Inhabiting Cyberspace in India: Theory, Perspectives, and Challenges 9789811599330, 9789811599347

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Simi Malhotra Kanika Sharma Sakshi Dogra   Editors

Inhabiting Cyberspace in India Theory, Perspectives, and Challenges

Inhabiting Cyberspace in India

Simi Malhotra Kanika Sharma Sakshi Dogra •

•

Editors

Inhabiting Cyberspace in India Theory, Perspectives, and Challenges

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Editors Simi Malhotra Department of English Jamia Millia Islamia New Delhi, Delhi, India

Kanika Sharma Department of English Shyama Prasad Mukherji College University of Delhi New Delhi, Delhi, India

Sakshi Dogra Department of English Gargi College University of Delhi New Delhi, Delhi, India

ISBN 978-981-15-9933-0 ISBN 978-981-15-9934-7 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-9934-7

(eBook)

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

Acknowledgements

Inhabiting Cyberspace in India: Theory, Perspectives, and Challenges is an attempt to locate the digital presence within the locational boundaries of India. The understanding behind this project comes from a simple question can we read a phenomenon made available through economic globalization in a completely contained manner? Do the questions pertaining to digital studies transform when applied to a national context? This thought made itself apparent during the discussions and academic exchange that started in 2012 in a research seminar titled, ‘Cyber-ian Turn in Culture’, when research scholars were more interested in tapping the significance of digital presence in India. This book is an attempt to present a theoretical framework to locate a structure enmeshed with economic, social, and political index within a universalized and imaginary digital. Springer Nature helped us present these ideas in the form of this book, and we are especially thankful to Satvinder Kaur, Gowrishankar Ayyasamy and Arun Kumar Raviselvam. We hope that this book ruptures the binary language of the digital and germinate ideas for more rewarding sociocultural discussions in the future.

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Contents

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Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Simi Malhotra, Kanika Sharma, and Sakshi Dogra

Part I 2

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Cyber-Critiques: Of Exclusion, Surveillance and Co-optation

Finless Fishes in the Cyberian Sea: Internet and Exclusion in India . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Satadru Chatterjee

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Surveillance as Norm . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Joshil K. Abraham

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Cyberspace and the Illusions of Ultra-Democracy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Prashant Gupta

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Part II 5

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Cyber-Politics: The New Media and Alternative Modes of Resistance

Digital Feminist Interventions: A Critical Assessment of the Pink Chaddi Campaign and #MeToo in India . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sapna Dudeja

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New Media, Identity and Minorities: The Role of Internet in Mainstreaming of Muslims in India . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mohammad Reyaz

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Part III

Cyber-Aesthetics and Narratives of Leisure

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Cyberspace and the Aesthetics of Contemporary Perception . . . . . Sunil Kumar

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A Cyberian Turn in Pornography: Understanding Internet as a Sexual Medium . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sakshi Dogra

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Contents

‘Yeh Bik Gai Hai Gormint’ Understanding Meme Culture in India . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Kanika Sharma

10 From Underground ‘Sutta’ to Mainstream ‘Kolaveri Di’: Understanding Social Media Through Changing Perceptions of Popular Music in the Indian Subcontinent . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Vikas Jain Part IV

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Cyber-Narratives: Roleplaying, Interactivity and Authority

11 Virtual Slaves, Real Profits . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107 Prayag Ray 12 What Is Playing Cyborg: An Investigation of the Gamer as a Figure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119 Prabhash Ranjan Tripathy 13 Encountering Digital Hypertext Fiction: Postmodern Potentialities of a Cyborg Reader . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127 Janhavi Mittal 14 ‘Moving’ Poetry: Affect and Aesthetic in Instapoetry . . . . . . . . . . . 135 Shweta Khilnani

Editors and Contributors

About the Editors Simi Malhotra is Professor at Department of English, Jamia Milia Islamia, Delhi. Her research interests include contemporary literary and cultural theory, culture studies, and Indian philosophies and aesthetic practices. She has more than 19 years of teaching and research experience, and has published 5 books and edited volumes, 53 articles and 12 book reviews. She has participated in a host of conferences, seminars, workshops, symposia and panel discussions. Kanika Sharma holds an M.Phil. degree and is currently working as Assistant Professor at the English Department of Shyama Prasad Mukherji College For Women, University of Delhi. Her research interests include cultural studies, memory studies, collective memory, film studies, visual arts and literature. She is closely associated with CATA (Centre for Academic Translation and Archiving) and CSVMT (Centre for Studies in Violence, Memory and Trauma) at the University of Delhi. Sakshi Dogra is currently working as Assistant Professor and teaches English literature and language at Gargi College, University of Delhi. She is simultaneously pursuing her Ph.D. research titled “Food, Feelings and Flavors: A Study of Contemporary Indian Writing in English on Food” from Jamia Millia Islamia.

Contributors Joshil K. Abraham is Assistant Professor at G. B. Pant Engineering College, GGS Indraprastha University, Delhi. He is also part of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Research Network Series on ‘Writing, Analysing, Translating Dalit Literature’. He co-edited Dalit Literatures in India (Routledge, 2015; 2nd edition 2018). He, along with Dr. Ganga Sahay Meena, has translated

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and published the book Sociology of Translation (Atulya Publication) by Dr. Surya Narayan Ransubhe from Hindi into English. He is co-editing a volume Caste in/and Film with Judith Misrahi Barak (Routledge, Forthcoming 2021). Satadru Chatterjee is Assistant Professor of English and Communication Skills in the Department of Applied Science and Humanities, Ambedkar Institute of Advanced Communication Technologies and Research, Government of NCT of Delhi. He completed his Ph.D. from Jamia Millia Islamia. The title of his thesis is License to Frame: Representation of the Political Other in James Bond Novels. His areas of interests are literary theory, popular fiction, and the culture industry. Sapna Dudeja is Assistant Professor for English at Dyal Singh Evening College and has been teaching in the University of Delhi since 2010. She is a gold medallist (M.A. English) from University of Delhi and also a university topper (M.Phil., Jamia Millia Islamia). She was awarded the prestigious Habib Kidwai Student Fellowship by MCRC, Jamia Millia Islamia, in 2009. She has presented several research papers in national as well as international conferences and seminars. She has also published several articles in reputed journals. Her research areas include literary theory and criticism, popular culture, and translation studies. Prashant Gupta is Assistant Professor of Literature at OP Jindal Global University, Sonipat, India. He has nine years of teaching experience in English Literature in Delhi University colleges. He has worked in theatre as Actor and Director. He has also worked as Software Engineer, before turning to academics. His research interests include the development of the novel, its concerns with social transgression, and its openness to new conceptual categories, including resisting subjectivities, a schematic offering a riposte to the theorizations of the Subaltern School of History and Cultural Post-Colonialism. He has also worked and written on the interplay between Caste and Class, and the history of Labour and Left Politics in India. Vikas Jain is Assistant Professor of English at Zakir Husain Delhi College (Evening), University of Delhi. He completed his Ph.D. at Centre for English Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi. His research interests include postcolonial studies, culture studies, Indian Writing in English, translation studies and practice, and online youth cultures. Several of his translations were published in a four-volume anthology entitled Complete Short Stories of Premchand, published by Penguin Random House. Shweta Khilnani is a Ph.D. scholar at the University of Delhi, New Delhi. She is also Assistant Professor, Department of English at SGTB Khalsa College, New Delhi. Her Ph.D. research focuses on different forms of female self-expression and affective communities in the Indian digital space. She is invested in the study of popular cultures, affective theory, and visual cultures. Sunil Kumar is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English Studies, Royal Thimphu College, Bhutan. He completed his undergraduate and postgraduate studies from the University of Delhi and his M.Phil. and Ph.D. from Jamia Millia

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Islamia University, Delhi. His areas of interest include literary theory, visual culture, and aesthetics. He also translates fiction from Hindi to English and has translated and published short stories by Munshi Premchand. He has taught in the University of Delhi for more than ten years and has also served as Assistant Language Teacher in the Japanese Government School System for a year before joining Royal Thimphu College. Janhavi Mittal is Research Associate at the Oakland Institute, an advocacy group that works on land and resource rights-related issues. She is a Ph.D. researcher in the Department of English Literature at King’s College London. She is supported by their Overseas Graduate Research Scholarship. Her research focuses on South African literature, the environmental humanities, and the possibilities of planetary fiction. Prayag Ray is Assistant Professor of English at St. Xavier’s University, Kolkata. He completed his BA and MA from Jadavpur University, his M.Phil. from Jawaharlal Nehru University, and his Ph.D. from Queen’s University, Belfast. His M.Phil. research was on Indian speculative fiction, while his Ph.D. research was on British and Irish representations of Hinduism in the eighteenth century. His research interests include fantasy fiction, culture studies, religion and literature, and postcolonial literature. He has published a chapter in the Springer volume Critical Posthumanism and Planetary Futures (2016) and creative writing in Poetry Ireland Review. Mohammad Reyaz is Assistant Professor in the Department of Journalism and Mass Communication, Aliah University, Kolkata, and University of Delhi. He completed his Ph.D. in international studies from Jamia Millia Islamia. As a former journalist, he often writes for different media at the intersectionality of identity, media, and politics. His articles have appeared in Al Jazeera, The Wire, India Times, DailyO, DNA, etc. He has also published several research papers and chapters in national and international publications. He is active on social media and can be found https://reyaz.in. Prabhash Ranjan Tripathy is currently pursuing his Ph.D. from the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, and the project explores the cultural location of video games in India. He completed his M.Phil. from Jawaharlal Nehru University which centred on studying video game parlours of Delhi and Mussoorie. His research interests include superhero comic books, anime, video games, combat sports, and mythology. He is fascinated by felines and loves to trek, read, write, click, and play.

Chapter 1

Introduction Inhabiting Cyberspace in India: Theory, Perspectives, and Challenges Simi Malhotra, Kanika Sharma, and Sakshi Dogra

In a recent survey on Internet users in the world, conducted in March 2020 by Internet World Stats, Asia tops the graph by 2300 million users and India takes about 24.3% of that share which is only second to China.1 These numbers are descriptive of a phenomenon that we are widely aware of, i.e., the presence or rather the penetration of Internet in India, which is constantly growing and transforming the socio-cultural space and our interaction both as an individual and as a collective with it. This collection of essays tries to uncover the political potential of this very socio-cultural space by initiating discussions on identity formation, alter-collectivities and consumption practices, and aesthetics that germinate from studying cyberspace in India. The definition and understanding of cyberspace have gone through a long line of negotiations from the envisioned science fiction model of William Gibson in 1984 novel Neuromancer, followed by a more coherent interpretation of that reality by Michael Benedikt in 1996 (Benedickt 1991, 1996). From then on, with every technological advancement and new innovation, both through hardware and software, cyberspace has ushered a redefinition of the rules of engagement with our immediate 1 https://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm.

S. Malhotra (B) Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, India e-mail: [email protected] K. Sharma · S. Dogra Department of English, Shyama Prasad Mukherji College for Women, University of Delhi, New Delhi, India e-mail: [email protected] S. Dogra e-mail: [email protected] S. Dogra Department of English, Gargi College, University of Delhi, New Delhi, India © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 S. Malhotra et al. (eds.), Inhabiting Cyberspace in India, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-9934-7_1

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material reality. Cyberspace has become a diversified theoretical concept heavily grounded in the networked reality of virtual hyper-real environments and digital immersive systems. For instance, easily available VR headsets, Augmented Reality and Mixed Reality devices are interfacing with intuitive gestures and emotions. Since the concept and the field of cyberspace are ever evolving, with more and more web pages indexed every minute, it is crucial that we be selective. The only node that remains a constant in these debates is the Internet, its resultant culture, and its multitude existence of information and communication networks. This then is also our focal point of interaction with cyberculture in this project of ours. In this book, we exclusively focus on cyberculture as it exists in India, both online and offline. We are interested in the interactions and engagements of people on/with the Internet. And instead of settling for a static and flawed bifurcation of reading cyberspace as either simply liberating or demonically oppressing, the book talks about instances of how physicality of the events hosted in India is important to redefine the generic understanding of cyberculture. One cannot dismiss the presence of technology and the way it has shaped and continues to shape our lives today. But this ubiquitous nature is also marked with obscure elements of a binary language of coding and hardware, which makes it difficult to unruffle and connect issues pertaining to a socio-cultural collective that constitutes our cyber-cultural horizon today. The pervasive and ever-evolving nature of cyberspace often leads us to think of it as a digitized superhighway, devoid of any history or a specifically marked spatial terrain. However, through this work, we attempt to redefine this model of understanding in order to engage with questions of politics, class, gender, labor, sexuality, and culture in cyberspace. Our conjecture is that questions concerning identity forces cyberspace to be envisioned with history and space, a history that is not just bound by teleological digital progression but by marking events that spearhead cultural movements offline. For instance, the more recent movements of digital activism from hashtag revolution, #MeToo, #Hokkolorob, #JeSuisCharlie, Arab Spring, Occupy Movement and #BlackLivesMatter to name a few, to more democratic, cooperative digital platforms, such as SomComuns, hacktivist organization Anonymous and the inventive app Periscope, all have been increasingly using the digital platform to bring about social change in their own ways. The targeted hashtag revolution goes beyond the culture of slacktivism and clicktivism, where individuals click on online petitions in isolation without concern for its political impact. These movements function on performing a collective action not just through the virtual space but through its impact on the streets as well. There is thus an urgent need to address the cultural space which entirely redefined communication, identity politics, aesthetics, entertainment, market, and questions of labor. The slow death of Indian cyber cafés in the last 20 years creates a perfect starting point to understand the presence of the Internet and its devices and the collective engagement it offered to a generation of users. The very first of these cyber cafés popped up in 1996 in Mumbai’s five-star Hotel Leela, and another one followed in ITC Maurya Hotel, and within a matter of ten years about 200,000 of these cyber cafés had popped up across the country, where one would pay hourly and spend

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what seemed like eons to wait for the dial tone modem to connect to the Internet and our first interaction with the world wide web began. These spaces that mushroomed in the country and served everyone from school kids, teenagers to old uncles and aunties, were essentially created for Internet surfing/browsing. From understanding chat rooms, playing games, checking exam results, booking tickets to watching porn, these spaces created a pocket in our social and cultural landscape. They existed and proliferated not only because the Internet access and its devices were expensive, but also the hardware and software were pretty unintelligible because of its coded language. Subsequently, with the mass availability of mobile phones and cheaper laptops, the disappearance of cyber cafés was inevitable. However, the appearance of the Internet on our social and cultural horizon determined the very modes of production, consumption, and distribution and also rules of engagement, be they economic, cultural, or social. Even though not unique to India, the narrative of technological advancement was also attached to national development. As Punathambekar and Mohan write, “The growing prominence of the Internet and other digital media technologies was linked to a discernible shift in national imaginaries that saw governments and market forces in South Asia and across the Global South come to regard digital infrastructure as central to national development” (Punathambekar and Mohan 2019). Added to this is the mushrooming of call centers, geeky software developers and cheap software testing, and click-farms that dot the new reality in India. This image creates a stark contrast with the global digital movement, particularly in the Northern hemisphere. (2–3) More than the difference in experience, it is the entire socio-economic policy and the transformed cultural space which makes the investigation into the initial interaction of individuals with the Internet intriguing. Cyberculture in India thus provides an exciting and enriching space to interrogate formative movements offering a unique perspective. This, in turn, posits a need to engage with theoretical works that understand these shifts as not just representative of a third world country and/or clubs important moments/movements with the discourse highlighting lack of resources of India but rather we should locate the groundwork for new theoretical models based on the spaces that are uniquely created, disrupted and reconfigured as a consequence of this shift. The current volume with its diverse collection of essays is important especially at a time when various digital humanities departments in India are formulating and are encountering the need to understand the locational presence of digital debates in our current context. Each of the sections of the volume attempts to raise issues to unravel the jargon around cyberspace and talk about the relational aspect of our interaction with it in India. The theoretical and philosophical events analyzed in this collection bring forth the questions of relationality vis-à-vis all aspects of cyberculture in the country, from the physical to the virtual. The first section titled “Cyber-critiques: Of Exclusion, Surveillance, and Cooptation” opens with a very vital question of accessibility to the Internet against the backdrop of severe disparity in the socio-economic demographic of India. The section also talks about surveillance as a way to navigate and condition the digital populace and debunks the narrative of the success of the IT industry in India as a milestone in

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national growth. The section largely focuses on how cyberspace in India is far from the notion of an inclusive and emancipatory space it is usually made out to be. From understanding this lack (both structural and cultural) which is unique to a stratified country like India, the second section titled, “Cyber-politics: The New Media and Alternate modes of Resistance” explore the political participation that the Internet enables. Despite its problems the Internet creates “alternate spaces” for identity formation and alter-collectivities whether they be in the form of feminist movements such as formative cyber activism that started with the Pink Chaddi Campaign. The success of these movements stands testimony to a complete redefinition of questions of gender, identity, and politics. The third section, titled, “Cyber-aesthetics and Narratives of Leisure” explores the spatiality of the medium through which a user navigates the space. The ever-evolving platforms of entertainment and leisure, that cyberspace offers become an interesting study of changing modes of produsage in the domain. The section discusses the asymmetrical relationship between individual agency and collective productivity vis-à-vis online consumption practices such as watching pornography, listening to popular songs, and producing memes. The concluding section titled, “Cyber-narratives: Roleplaying, Interactivity, and Authority” take this discussion forward and tries to locate the agency of the individual in cyberspace through the inception of immersive digital technologies and Electronic literature. Moreover, the continued engagement with cyberspace reveals that is not just changing our understanding of socio-cultural identity and expanding spaces of participative politics but is also creating new digital formations that are altering the identity, market, and consumption models like never before.

Cyber-Critiques: Of Exclusion, Surveillance, and Co-optation We have always bought into the initially marketed idea of the Internet as a neutral ground, enabling progress and global avenues for growth, but the first section showcases how this insidious nexus of information society and technological progress is nothing but a realignment of new channels of capital inflow and opportunities. The book begins with a criticism that is often omitted when discussing the inundated idea of cyberspace as ubiquitous and offering illuminous potential to humans through information technology. This criticism gives us a perfect start to understand how cyberspace when read vis-á-visa specific geographical location (for us it is India), provides an insight into a sense of unique and contextual challenges. These include a catalogue of exclusionary politics, digital colonialism, and most importantly, currency of access enabled and surveilled technology whose distribution is incumbent on class-based structures. The first paper by Satadru Chatterjee, “Finless Fishes in the Cyber-ian Sea: Internet and Exclusion in India”, looks at access in terms of affordability or the lack thereof. He argues that in the discussion of the digital divide both within and outside of

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India, the terminology and statistics fail to register the magnitude of the divide. By deploying terms such as “developing country” to conceive the lack of infrastructure as the only hurdle (that too solely economic), does little in terms of understanding a variety of problems specific to our country. The socio-economic disparity in terms of caste, religion, and other fractions erupting from the very language of access being English, makes the digital divide between urban and rural populations to be 5:95. Such a major gap cannot be met through the programmes provided under a “liberal-digital-technological route”. For instance, the very apparent economic disparity within the country fails to be met through various national programmes of providing infrastructure to access the Internet through Aakash tablets, Ubuntu laptops to students in government schools and colleges, as the majority of rural population, beyond the institutions, cannot afford to buy these devices and avail the Internet. He thus concludes by positing that parity cannot be architected just by exclusively “providing” the infrastructure while undermining all the other real threats of the divide that are beyond the digital. Following this discussion of access that is only afforded through a contextual socio-economic paradigm, the second paper inspects another compulsory “cost” of that access that every end-user has to partake in the virtual world, that is surveillance, both stated and unstated, leading to a tech-driven authoritarian regime. With the advent of 4G technology and affordable mobile Internet packages on phones, we have entered a phase where surveillance is increasingly justified as a necessity for our security and safety. In the second paper “Surveillance as Norm”, Joshil K. Abraham, argues that since its capitalist ends are multifocal, surveillance seeps into our system in apparently “harmless” ways. By presenting case studies of various surveillance software, spyware that monitor online activities for various purposes, ranging from information collection, navigating movements, and targeted advertising, he discusses how psychological surveillance disciplines and controls the populace. Abraham concludes his paper rather optimistically by locating the countermodels in the works of Internet activists like Julian Assange, and encourages one to accept surveillance as a given, as a norm, and suggests that one can possibly subvert the system by overloading it instead of buying into fear psychosis. The third paper of this section takes the discussion further and details the political economy of technology. Prashant Gupta in his paper, “Hypertext and the Bourgeois Illusions of Ultra-democracy” seeks to expose the façade of progress and IT sector employment in India, and shows how there are no possibilities of “inclusive growth” in the domain of the digital sphere. He underlines how technology today is mediated by the capitalist modes of production and is problematically marketed as progressive and neutral. However, this “neutrality” of technology is a myth which is circulated to reinforce hegemonic structures.

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Cyber-Politics: The New Media and Alternative Modes of Resistance The second section of the book tests the viability of the criticism offered in the first section. The roadblocks highlighted therein fail to register the cultural disruptions that the Internet has enabled. How to read the access to Internet and its lack, when movements and collectives move from the screen to the streets? The changing nature of digital activism is focusing on the individual more than ever before, providing a space for the individual to take action without support from the state or other nonstate actors. The dissemination of information in the age of leak-tivism has brought the source of the message under scrutiny. For instance, a shaky phone recorded live video holds more “truth” online than a professionally shot televised news broadcast, which seems increasingly manipulated and orchestrated to serve other interests. The second section of this book engages with questions of identity where different papers explore identity as it erupts through exchanges in blogs, social media, and alternate spaces that virtual collectives enable. It further goes on to examine (through case studies) the formation of minority networks of interaction in new media, and the creation of new platforms for formulating cultural identity through online clubs and protest petitions. As discussion forums and blogs are a space of sharing news, opinions, and carrying out informal conversations, it becomes a breeding ground for communal groupings. Another thing that differentiates blogs from web pages is the fact that they follow a temporal sequence for their conversation threads which makes it interesting to analyze and study such blogs over a period of time. This gives us a question worth asking, how can such decentralized and informal websites acquire political power and when do these participatory spaces transcend from becoming a community forum of presentation and differing dialogue to influencing political policies through a “new” strengthened sense of identity? This transcendence through the participatory spaces of discussion forums leading to cyberactivism is deftly captured in the first paper of this section titled, “Digital Feminist Interventions: A Critical Assessment of the Pink Chaddi Campaign and #MeToo in India” by Sapna Dudeja. The paper explores the potentials of cyberactivism and sousveillance by studying non-violent protest campaigns. She starts with PCC (Pink Chaddi Campaign), a movement that formulated in India, and goes on to connect the tracing of a global movement #MeToo and its growth and spread in India. Pink Chaddi Campaign started through an online social networking website, Pink Chaddi Campaign (PCC) launched by “Consortium of Pub-Going, Loose and Forward Women”, in the year 2009, started after social moral policing in Mangalore by the political group Sri Ram Sena. This non-violent protest movement also gave way to other notable movements against moral policing in various parts of the country, such as BesharmiMorcha (2011) in Bhopal, Delhi, Lucknow, and Bangalore, Kiss of Love (2014), the Napkin Protest (2014) in Kerala, and the #Hokkolorob (2014) that started in Kolkata with major protest demonstrations in various parts of India.

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Dudeja through her study of these two movements traces not just the progressive nature of this space but also underlines how when these movements against gender-based violence (and through selective outrage of sexual crimes) unveil a rather fractured collective. This showcases a reiteration of religious, caste, and classbased stereotypes. The subversive movement of participatory politics, according to Dudeja, is yet to take its course as proper revolution, and the fact that it showcases factions which are otherwise never registered makes it easier to initiate dialogues beyond the virtual. It is interesting to note that online protests go much beyond the virtual space as its intended motive is to create a protest agitation on the ground. The success of virtual protests depends on its ability to create ripples in the real social world outside of cyberspace. Mass participation in formulating collectives through and beyond the digital has increasingly become a part of our immediate reality. Politics today is getting defined by Twitter polls and fake news and new media infusion happening through WhatsApp forwards. One needs to investigate the potentials a virtual space can offer when the physical realm is a contested site of surveillance and terror. Especially post the recent political move by the Indian government, i.e., abrogation of Article 370 in Kashmir, it is interesting to trace the digital culture that got reconfigured during these uprisings. Since 2012 there have been 179 recorded Internet shutdowns in Kashmir and the recent move sent the entire region in a communication blackout, everything from the Internet, DTH services to telephone networks have been shut (Business Today 2019). This move to counter disinformation and propaganda videos cannot be tackled by just cutting off the Internet, but in turn, it informs the relevance that the Internet and new media holds in a contested space like Kashmir. What kind of politics can such a discussion entail and fulfil? Are virtual community forum and such political mobilization, less credible than the real? Is it an efficacious space available for protest and dissent against authority? Can cyberspace equip the grounds to counter mainstream media and its insidious narratives and how viable is it in the face of fake news? The second paper in the section, “Identity, New Media, Minority Voices: Case Study of Two Circles Network” by Mohammad Reyaz talks about the potential that this “alternate” space offers for minority voices, through a study of emerging virtual media networks and collective identity formations of Muslims in India. Reyaz highlights that the identity of Muslims post 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks has been deemed problematic especially in mainstream media, which is embedded in dominant biases and prejudice. Though there has been community-based media even before the Internet, the virtual scape has advanced its propagation and has given the alternative “voice” a global reach, thereby enabling a much more participatory model of forging identities than ever before. Through this Reyaz states that not all alternate community media is plausible, and by viewing Muslims as a socio-economic group rather than a religious one, TCN creates and focuses on news differently. Such “democratization” of mediascape should definitely be taken with a pinch of salt, but the very existence of such spaces exhibits a discussion space that can potentially get digested very easily in market-driven propagandist media culture. Reyaz concludes that the emergence

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of community media, especially in the times of fake news forwards, not only helps form an alternate forum for voicing and discussing issues without filters but it also helps strengthen the identity of a minority group, despite the risk of such media scape potentially becoming parochial.

Cyber-Aesthetics and Narratives of Leisure The third section of this volume engages with interactive and digital entertainment systems available on cyberspace, particularly in its visual and aural forms. The section begins with the understanding of a unique and novel aesthetic perception that cyber ushers and how the latter reshapes traditional modes of interaction. As exemplified up till here, the advent of the Internet has proven to be a watershed moment in terms of participatory cultures of protest and identity formation as well as forging dissent. The papers collected here analyze creative practices in order to unpack some essential questions concerning spatiality. Through this section, we seek to investigate leisure activities such as listening to popular music, watching pornography, and sharing memes to posit how media and entertainment platforms on the Internet provide singular ways of being and becoming. To begin, in his paper titled “Cyberspace and the Aesthetics of Contemporary Perception”, Sunil Kumar seeks to understand the shift in perception that has occurred with the advent of the Internet. In order to reach a conjecture, Sunil discusses Foucault’s notion of heterotopia and its characteristics which can provide a productive approach to understanding cyberspace. He undertakes a study of the spatiality of the virtual medium within the theoretical framework of articulations by continental philosophers such as Immanuel Kant, Paul Virilio, and Adorno. Having assessed how time and space function in cyberspace, he comes to the conclusion that in cyberspace “everything is now”, it’s a tyranny of “real-time virtuality” over physical material space. In conclusion, he posits that it is the “aesthetics of disappearance” that best illustrates the state of our contemporary perception. The popular phenomenon of disappearing photos, a tokenistic feature of apps like Snapchat and Instagram, also called “stories” for instance, lends itself to the exemplification of Kumar’s argument. This interest in defining the peculiar spatiality of cyberspace is further addressed in the paper, “The Cyberian Turn in Pornography: Internet as a Sexual Medium”, by Sakshi Dogra. She begins her paper with a case study of the 2012 Karnataka Porngate incident where a few ministers were caught watching a porn clip on their mobile phones during a parliament session. She asserts that the “accessibility”, “anonymity” and portability of the mobile screen blurs the traditional binaries of subject/object and boundaries of distinct public/private spaces. Thus, any productive debate on the question of cyber pornography needs to keep in mind that the Internet is a novel public–private space of relationality with its own peculiar modes of production, consumption, and circulation. These crucial questions concerning the change in accessibility and distribution with the pervasiveness of Internet in India become more pointed and significant in the

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paper, “Ye Bik Gai Hai Gormint”, Understanding meme culture in India”, by Kanika Sharma. She explores the popularity and channels of circulation and the participatory model that meme defines. She argues that memes not only hold a cultural and political valency equivalent to political cartooning but because of the digital medium and the copied and replicated model of meme-making it goes on to create a collaborative space of production and circulation. She argues that memes should be addressed and archived as a serious art form and spaces of cultural memory and emotional resonance as it goes on to capture and validate a collective sentiment of the public that exhibits a seemingly fleeting but popular cultural discussion on constantly reused templates. Popular cultural discussion also becomes a point of departure for Vikas Jain in his paper titled, “From Underground ‘Sutta’ to Mainstream ‘Kolaveri di’: Understanding Social Media through Changing Perceptions of Popular Music”. In this paper, Vikas seeks to undertake a case study of popular songs such as “BC Sutta” and “Kolaveri di” to give an enriching account of the contested and productive terrain that the web becomes where music is distributed while bypassing corporate distribution companies. In conclusion, the author addresses the vast terrain of popular cyber soundscape in India, to detail out the fast but unmistakable change from the “former audience” to the consumer and music enthusiast that dots the contemporary cyber soundscape.

Cyber-Narratives: Roleplaying, Interactivity, and Authority This final section of the book discusses the immersive forms of engagement that the Internet and digital technology has enabled. The section primarily focuses on two aspects to index the cultural, political, and economic concerns that are shaped and even created through digitally immersive platforms first through the formation of a gamer through video games, MMPORGs, and spectator sport and second through the investigation of Electronic Literature, through hypertext and Instapoetry. “Yeh PubG wala hai kya?” Prime Minister Modi said this during an interaction with students and parents at Pariksha Pe Charcha 2.0, this multiplayer online battle royale game has become a massive platform in India since its introduction in the year 2017. With over 120 million gamers in India, a public interest litigation case filed against it, and cities of the country banning its use, it is no exaggeration to say that figure of the online gamer and spectator sports have unleashed in India. Spurring this industry are cheaper mobile Internet plans and mobile handsets equipped to run video games which earlier were only accessed through expensive machines. The interesting nexus actually unveils when this video game player becomes a streamer through platforms like Youtube and Twitch, and a gaming community erupts through discussion forums and exchanges in the highly lucrative market of spectator sports. The anxieties and desires that are enmeshed in the agency of consumers/enthusiasts/users and in this case players are problematized by Prayag Ray in his paper, “Virtual Slaves, Real Profits: The Economics of the Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game”, who discusses the network of commodity fetishism that operates in MMPORGs which engulfs the players in a market controlled by capitalists in the real world.

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He gives a thorough analysis of how consumer culture is created in these spaces, by providing a culture of endless desires and demands, and a virtual economy is created which gets buttressed in real life by selling subscriptions, cheats, special getaways, character upgrades, and bonus levels and so on. Furthermore, the charts out a pathway from the real to the virtual where he talks about obsessive consumption and commodity fetishism which affects these addictive players. He connects the latter to the consumer market created through sweatshops and commodity sales and gold-farming, where one can see the clear transference of virtual money into real money. Ray’s concern on the understanding socio-economic model of the virtual world is taken up in the next paper by Prabash Ranjan Tripathy as he examines the identity formation of the figure of the gamer and if it can be read as cyborg. Outlining the technological shifts in video games and its presence in India, Tripathy’s paper titled, “What is Playing Cyborg? An investigation of the Gamer as a figure” tries to map the movement of a gamer in India as it formed starting from arcade games to the varied contemporary gaming culture. Furthermore, he explores how through the politics of technological artefact the disciplinary structures of society are mapped onto the gaming world. This discussion of progressively narrowing gap between human–machine interface and talks about the cyborg as a participant as offered in and through cyberspace is taken forward through the third paper of this section titled, “Encountering Digital Hypertext Fiction: Postmodern Potentialities of a Cyborg Reader”, by Janhavi Mittal. She explores the politics of new reading practices that a digitized hyper-reality offers. She engages with a hypertext software called StorySpace which gives autonomy to readers to choose their own pathways and write their own textual inputs. Such a reading/writing is different from pre-hypertext postmodern fiction, as it develops a myriad of multiple, parallel, and often unpredictable narrative pathways and inserts the readers into the hypertext as not just texts but as active constructors of these narratives. In the final section of her paper, Janhavi studies a hypertext novel by Shelley Jackson called A Patchwork Girl. She concludes by underlining the emergence of a cyborg body in postmodern culture which constantly challenges the political potential through its plural cross-networked nexus of medium(s) and fragments. The section closes with exploring another of these digital fragments or rather “always already incomplete” form of Electronic Literature, Instapoetry. It brings to the fore a unique juncture when the digital medium creates a style or form of poetry that functions only because of the visual aesthetic, and like-share model of its medium. Khilnani in her paper titled, “‘Moving’ Poetry Affect and Aesthetic of Instapoetry”, discusses the participatory and affective aspect of Instapoetry. Through her discussion of one of the most known InstapoetRupi Kaur, she argues that by reading its themes, production, and consumption models on digital platforms, one can perceive the dialectic between affect and politics which creates a reality that punctures through the screen and charts a trajectory outside of the digital. The papers in this edited volume while defining and charting the very specific node of the Internet and understanding of cyberculture unique to India, try to present a dialogue that goes beyond the particular case studies and cultural events that these

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papers represent. The essays gesture towards a more colossal and complex networked reality whose seeds are sowed in these landmark events. The volume tries to showcase theoretically researched vantage points to garner new perspectives. In our understanding, it is impending to capture this research wave in urban India, a geographical location marked by obscurity and explicit iterations at the same time. The essays exhibit a unique set of problems and discussions, that if registered through blanket euphemisms of “developing country”, “economic and technological lack”, “lack of educational infrastructure”, will never be able to bring a complete understanding of cyberculture. It should be stated that this collection of essays can in no way map the entire gamut of theoretical debates in digital cultures and media ecologies, but the collection attempts to situate a very important juncture in understanding the complexities around cyberspace and digital culture in India that are often ignored, in the larger debate about globalization and culture. The very definitions of information and communication are changing with each new hardware and software update and the current volume is an attempt to survey the ecology of this change through theoretical models grounded in India. It is imperative to review these crucial debates from the theoretical origin to its movement and get originary insights from research scholars who delve into questions beyond the apparent luminous structure of cyberspace and complicate the matrix by inscribing socio-cultural codes that aren’t just binary. The importance to set the theoretical model that is bespoke of a specific geographical trajectory will enable our understanding of space for locating channels of production and consumption informed by this new digital cultural economy in India.

References Benedikt, Michael. 1991. Cyberspace: First Steps. Cambridge: MIT Press. Business Today. 2019. https://www.businesstoday.in/current/economy-politics/Kashmirdisconne cted-blackout-hits-local-news-websites-telephonelinesdown/story/370930.html. 6 August 2019, 15 November 2019. Everette, Anna. 2009. Digital Diaspora: A race for cyberspace. Albany: State University of NewYork Press. Gere, Charlie. 2008. Digital Culture. London. Reaktion Books Ltd. Punathambekar, Aswin, and Sriram Mohan. 2019. Global Digital Cultures: Perspectives fromSouth Asia. Michigan: University of Michigan Press. Silver, David, and Adrienne Massanari. 2006. Critical Cyberculture Studies. New York: New YorkUniversity Press.

Part I

Cyber-Critiques: Of Exclusion, Surveillance and Co-optation

Chapter 2

Finless Fishes in the Cyberian Sea: Internet and Exclusion in India Satadru Chatterjee

Abstract This paper seeks to enquire whether the Cyberian turn in culture, especially in the case of India, can truly be called a turn, or is it yet another seamless straight-forward extension in the exclusionary path that the country has treaded thus far? Is participation in cyberspace voluntary? Or, is it a forced necessity—especially when governmental policy-decisions are considered? What is the nature of the efforts to bridge the digital divide? Whose interests does this attempted bridging serve the most? What politics enables the major institutions of the country to function (sometimes solely) through the Internet? When information is currency, what happens to the vast majority who cannot tread the information-highway? Where can we locate cyberspace at the margins of the ‘global village’? Seeking answers to the above questions—most of them rhetorical, the paper seeks to understand, first, the nature of technology and, second, the nature of the Internet. More specifically, how do these forces react at the behest of the powerful and the privileged—politically and economically? The paper also seeks to measure the extent of the digital divide in India and its impact on the underprivileged of the country. Keywords Technology · Internet · Exclusion · Digitalization · Digital divide · Cyberspace

S. Chatterjee (B) NSUT (East Campus) (Formerly AIACTR, Govt. of NCT Delhi), New Delhi, India e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 S. Malhotra et al. (eds.), Inhabiting Cyberspace in India, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-9934-7_2

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Introduction Agnes, Milan Kundera’s protagonist for the novel Immortality arises out of a gesture of an aged lady towards her young male swimming instructor. And it is a complete coincidence that the central question/anxiety of this paper arises also from a gesture of two of my friends in Delhi giving a high-five to each other: ‘Yay! We are cyborgs1 !’. My friends, of course, belong to my private sphere, but this gesture becomes a socio-political act when studied against the peculiar geopolitical background of India: it overtakes the individuals involved and begins to appear as a symptom for the attitude of the Indian privileged towards the digitalization question and the Internet. Any modern technological development (the printing press, the steam engine, the telegraph, the telephone, the television, etc.) as it has occurred at its own historical moment has always been—and naturally—captured by the bourgeoisie. Even the computer without Internet belongs to the same category, in a sense as Marshall Mcluhan crucially holds that technology does not introduce movement, it accelerates movement, that is it brings about a ‘change of scale or pace or pattern’ (Mcluhan 1964). And via Horkheimer and Adorno one may reach the simple conclusion that: the basis on which technology acquires power over society is the power of those whose economic hold over society is greatest. A technological rationale is the rationale of domination itself. (Adorno 2002)

But the Internet is a development of a different category altogether in the sense that it does not only change the ‘scale or pace or pattern’ of an already extant model or phenomenon; it has the power to create and introduce and also, to obliterate and annihilate. By creating the virtual space, what it goes on to obliterate (in a sense that it renders beyond view) is the ‘real space’. And it survives because it is self-referential; not only does it make the referent redundant, but it also forgets the referent. This aspect of the Internet becomes very important, as it ‘leaves most of humanity at the mercy of real reality’ (Sardar 2000) while allowing for an infinite deferral of its recognition. Having said all that, one must not fall into the trap of considering the Internet an autonomous presence; the Internet phenomenon, in this sense, is just like any other technological phenomenon: the power of the medium coupled with its human agent. The emancipatory potential of the Internet that is relentlessly advertised, gathers hype precisely through a certain kind of distortive politics that portrays the Internet (or any other medium) as an independent reservoir to be equally exploited by all for knowledge/empowerment. It is so naturalized that we circulate in arguments assuming that the digital itself and then the divide are 1 Donna

Haraway in her ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ defines cyborgs as ‘a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction… The cyborg is a matter of fiction and lived experience that changes what counts as women’s experience in the late twentieth century’ (Haraway 2000, 291). But in the present context cyborg will be used in a much more reductive sense than that of Haraway (Haraway 2000, 310–313), because the gesture pasted against its particular background forgets that ‘cyborg writing is about the power to survive, not on the basis of original innocence, but on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world that marked them as other (Haraway 2000, 310).’ In this case, the gesture is one of othering.

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given categories and need to be addressed; we assume that the virtual space is just there, and then think, what do we do with it now? Jon Stratton in his ‘Cyberspace and the Globalization of Culture’ argues that only the introduction of computers did not create the cyberspace (Stratton 2000); tracing the cyberspace phenomenon to the invention of the telegraph,2 he writes: as the time taken to cross the geographical space decreases, that space is de-contextualized and replaced by a distinctly non-geographical hyperspace. In such a space, as [James] Carey explains, ‘symbols move independently of geography and independently and faster than transport’- precisely the precondition, in other words, for the reification of information we have come to take for granted in the computer age. (Stratton 2000)

The significance of such an analysis lies in the fact that it enables us to approach digitalization and the Internet boom in their specific context of the gradual development of global capital, it helps us see the phenomenon as a process, it lets us see cyberspace ‘in the service of capitalist exchange’ (Stratton 2000). It lets us question the democratizing face that the Internet has been given and the circulated myth of the emancipatory power of the Internet. Anna McCarthy in her ‘Cyberculture or Material Culture? Computers and the Social space of Work’ goes on to de-mystify the emancipatory myth around the Internet: From a materialist perspective, the virtuality paradigm in new media theory is a liberal fantasy of technologically aided transcendence. It is a form of digital utopianism in which the instantaneity and connectedness of new media solve sociological problems, bringing about a final release from body and history, politics and oppression. (McCarthy 2002)

One may extend her argument and say that calling this a ‘liberal fantasy’ is allowing too much innocence to the liberals. The sought end for the bourgeoisie is not to solve sociological problems, not even in fantasy; the effect of the obsession with the virtual lies in precisely maintaining the ‘sociological problems’ by unseeing/forgetting our geo-historic location and plunging into cyberspace. Our discussion ahead primarily seeks to prove this point. McCarthy ‘redefine[s] cyberspace to include the screen and space around it’ (2002) and this is an attempt to problematize the vastness of the space outside it. The problem of the digital divide acquires different shapes in the works of researchers depending on their locations and areas of problematizing. In the U.S. Gary Natriello, for example, in his ‘Bridging the Second Digital Divide’, takes up a sociological approach to study and address the two intra-U.S. digital divides: first, that of access and second, that of use. He notes that addressing the first divide that is introducing the gadget and the connection is not enough (2001). A similar conclusion is reached, but with much more pessimism, by Paul Attewell in his work ‘The First and the Second Digital Divide’. But, such analyses, undoubtedly useful in their own context, are of little significance to the Indian context, considering the status of the 2 Stratton

quotes James Carey: “The simplest and the most important point about the telegraph is that it marked the decisive separation of “transportation” and “communication”. And it is this separation and introduction of instantaneous communication without physical crossing of geographical boundaries becomes, according to Stratton, ideal for capitalist exchange.

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first divide itself. It has been acknowledged (for example see, Guillen and Suarez 2005; James 2008) that the problem has to be addressed at a globally cross-national level and at the same time at a national level. Jeffrey James in his ‘Digital Divide across All Citizens: A New Concept’ notes: developing countries are weighted by population size, the exceptionally rapid recent growth of the Internet in China serves to narrow even further existing measures of the shrinking divide between rich and poor countries. Indeed, my preliminary results suggest that the ratio of Internet users in developed as against developing countries is only 1.8. On the other hand, in China as elsewhere in the developing world, this recent growth has been accompanied by sharp increases in inequality among Internet users and a failure to reach the rural poor. Increasing within-country inequality of this kind offsets the effect of weighting developing countries by population size. (2008)

Though James’s analysis has some value for the present context, the problem with most of the researchers is [as we can see with Scott Wallsten (2005) or Guillen and Suarez (2005)] that their analyses and solutions are still based on statistics dealing with categories like ‘high-income countries’ and ‘rest of the world’ calculated mostly by the World Bank; and further, their point of entry into the digital question is strictly within the domain of the digital. Yet staying in this very domain, two important points made by Robert Hunter Wade in ‘Bridging the Digital Divide: New Routes to Development or New Forms of Dependency?’ may turn out to be very significant for the present occasion. Wade argues that in the present scheme of developmental policies, the developing world is even more disadvantaged by the ‘software-hardware arms race in the global market for savvy computer users’ (2002). Commenting on the U.S./Microsoft hegemony over software, he holds that the relentless innovations in software is ‘attractive to the minority of the younger, wealthier and better-educated people but is to the deterrence of others’ (2002). The second issue that he brings forward is that who is controlling the bridging of the digital divide and to what end, by citing the role of the World Bank editors on the net (2002). What we have here is not only the global digital divide but also the politics of bridging the divide. If we notice the phraseology, the position of the digital/cyber utopists/optimists becomes very clear; to crack a bad joke, the mission has become to bridge the ‘digital’ divide and not the divide. So, on one hand, we have global digital colonization and ‘new forms of dependency’, and on the other, the unique intranational structures of the South Asian countries in general and India in particular. But before we move further, a certain theoretical position must be made clear. In discussions as the ones by James, Gullien, and Suarez or Wade, the phrases ‘developing countries’ or ‘developed countries’ tend to lend a certain internal homogeneity. What must be understood is that within the developing countries, there are citizens of the developed world, that is to say, we must go beyond the rhetoric of the nation in any discussion of the virtual/cyber-space. Cyberspace specifically offers that emancipation from nationality or, in that case, from all forms of more concrete identities. Global netizenship is one click away, but the (deliberately) post(poned)-script to that is one has to afford the ‘click’. And in the age of global capital, those who remain within geographical boundaries are the ones who cannot afford the ‘click’. What the discourse around the digital and the divide, or cyberspace itself does is that by

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naturalizing digitalization, it manufactures a lack in the psycho-space of the vast majority of the populations in the developing countries; and therefore, the need to develop in the digital path is created and the development of the basic infrastructures is thrown into infinite postponement. The developed within the developing nations appropriates the quantity and the quality of the bridging process to ensure its own diffusion into the first world, in the present context, into cyberspace. Babu P. Ramesh in his ‘Cyber Coolies in BPO: Insecurities and Vulnerabilities of Non-Standard Work’ studies the evolution of the call center workers into ‘a new class of workers, with distinct features and differently conceived identity eroding even the basic rights at work’ in the developing countries ‘which are emerging as the electronic housekeepers of the west’ (2004). It is only with such an orientation that we can understand the issue of the Internet in India. For that, we must have some facts and figures about the digital divide within India. In his ‘Digital Divide in India: Measurement, Determinants, and Policy for Addressing the Challenges in Bridging the Digital Divide’ Sumanjeet Singh gives some important statistics till the latter half of the last decade. His measurements are of acute significance here, whereas, his conclusive gesture is exactly the symptom that this paper seeks to criticize. He cites the TRAI,3 2009 statistics of teledensity in different parts of India, indicating a huge disparity with Delhi showing 107.96% usage of telecommunication, Mumbai at 81.41, Chhattisgarh dumped at 4.8% and Jharkhand, the lowest in the table, at 3.49%; and the national overall usage is 25.34%, with 9.03% for rural areas and 64.48% for urban areas. But the funny part is footnote no. 9 where he writes: Whether the country has adequate teledensity commensurate with its development can be best judged by reference to a table prepared by the United Nations some years ago in which the co-relation between the per-capita income and teledensity was worked out. According to the table, for a per capita income of $1000 an annum, a teledensity of 3per cent is considered adequate. So, India has adequate teledensity, as we have not reached the per capita GDP of $1000 (it is about US$ 400) (2012).

Let us, for a moment, keep thaton hold. A little later, Singh prepares a table based on information from the IAMAI,4 in the year 2008, ‘Active Urban-Internet using individuals’ in India numbered 30.03 million; ‘Active-Rural Internet using individuals’ numbered 5.06 million; combined ‘Occasional’ Internet users numbered 14.31 million. But here again in footnote no. 10 we read: ‘Active Internet users are those who have used the Internet at least once in the last month-this is an internationally accepted benchmark for enumerating Internet users’ (Singh 2012). What we get from the two footnotes is the farce of statistical terminology, the art of hiding reality in numbers, and numbers in vocabulary; yet sticking to these figures and with the ‘regular’ senses of the terms ‘active’ and ‘occasional’ we go on to see that in 2008, 12% (active + occasional) of urban Indian population use the Internet, 1.2% (active + occasional) of rural Indian population used the Internet, and 4.5% of total Indian population used the Internet. Remembering the information given to us in 3 Telecom 4 Internet

Regulatory Body of India. and Mobile Association of India.

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the footnotes, now we may scale the actual Internet use in the whole country, which must be around X percent of the magical 4.5% mark we have reached. Singh goes on, somehow, to conclude: As far as the future of the digital divide is concerned in India, it is really very difficult to predict it. But, it is true that the present situation in India is not alarming (if not highly satisfactory). The gap of digital divide is getting narrower. It is expected that government policy and public private partnership will help in bridging the digital divide (2012).

This is an impossible gesture of unseeing. The figures, that we have, show that the various analyses done by the researchers of digital divide like Jeffrey James, Gullien and Suarez, Wallsten, Wade, etc. do not fit here. The issue at hand is not ‘bridging’ the divide at all; rather we should take up the Search for the digital itself. And about this Singh is right, the situation in India is not alarming, because the situation itself is absent, how can it be alarming! What must be addressed here is the politics that first allows a situation which is not there to be called a situation, and then, further, allows it to be called alarming or not alarming. My hyperbole is deliberate, just to point out, how sweepingly alarming the digital divide in India is. When the divide ratio is 5:95, and not even that, is it possible to approach the problem staying within the realm of the digital? Rather, what needs to be enquired is that how, in such a situation, does the state or the public institutions increasingly encourage functioning through Internet, leaving behind the sweeping majority of its people. Are not the national efforts to bridge the gap—Kapil Sibal’s subsidizing ‘Akaash’ tablets for students, for one—farcical? Ziauddin Sardar exposed the myth on which the Indian national/bourgeois narrative of bridging the digital gap is based: One of the most pernicious myths about the Internet is that it provides free access to all the information about everything to everybody everywhere at any time. To begin with, access to the Internet is not free. Individuals working in organizations, universities and reSearch institutions have ‘free’ access because there institutions pay. For individuals without institutional support, Internet access is an expensive luxury … One can feed a family of four in Bangladesh for that sort of money (1997).

And just to add to this, some minor and yet not unimportant things like the difference in ‘download speed’, reliability of electricity, etc. also come up to show, that without changing the basic material conditions of life, just the introduction (let us consider that the state introduces computers to all villages) of computers and Internet is a very superficial effort to solve a deep problem. Poncet and Ripert in their ‘Fractured Space: A Geographical Reflection on the Digital Divide’ (2007) note that the urban–rural ratio of download speed is 10: 1, which will go up to 23: 1, and will eventually result in the maximum flow ratio of 150: 1 (Poncet and Ripert 2007, 20). All these go on to show the complexity of the Internet question in a broadly underdeveloped country like India. The farce and implications of the whole process can be charted into five gradual steps: 1. The bourgeoisie/government in its old line of exclusive economic development takes up the digital route 2. The existing and severe material divide present in the country gets further aggravated

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3. Then the historical cause of this divide is forgotten, and attention is diverted towards ‘digital divide’ 4. Only tokenistic measures are taken up for a bridging of the divide. In the process, the government further allows ruthless profiteering by corporates 5. The bourgeoisie continues in its ruthless development and diffusion into the developed world, leaving the larger population of the country behind, advertising crocodile tears of reformist politics, yet retaining the nationalistic vocabulary of ‘developed-developing’, overtly identifying with the underdeveloped masses only to continue its exploitation further. Now, when the geopolitical background of the gesture, which caused the initial tremors, has been empirically scaled, what meaning does the gesture acquire? Susan Leigh Star in her ‘From Heista to Home Page: Feminism and the Concept of Home in Cyber Space’ uses Peggy McIntosh’s argument in ‘White Privilege and Male Privilege’ to develop her own assumptions about being homed/unhomed in cyberspace (Star 2000, 641).5 To draw from there, one may well say that this gesture is made possible by that ‘invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions’ (Star 2000, 641), which McIntosh calls ‘white privilege’ and we may, in our particular context, go on to call, urban bourgeois privilege. The gesture betrays the following: 1. Knowledge of English 2. A particular standard of education which provides entry into higher education, where the encounter with Haraway happens 3. Enough exposure to machines, not in the sense in which a worker is exposed to machines in a factory, where he/she is in the service of the machine and its owner, but in a sense where a machine is a gadget which serves 4. The right material conditions and the right geographical location that makes all the above possible 5. The right socio-cultural/religious background which allows the crossing of the gender boundaries quite smoothly. And evidently, the sweeping majority of the country lacks this ‘invisible, weightless knapsack of special provisions’ which allows the gesture. But what is the need for the whole country to be able to make the same gesture? And what happens when this gesture is one of the privileged minorities? To answer, I must use some metaphors. 5 Star

lays out five conditions which need to be fulfilled to be homed in cyberspace. The relevant conditions for us are money, literacy, ‘access to maintenance people’ (which means money and right geographical location) and ‘time and inclination, and enough social network, to have others to write to and read’ (Star 2000, 641). She goes on to say: I would hope that a feminist vision of homed-ness and homelessness in cyberspace would build on this list and modify some of the hype about the ‘Net’ with a deeper and subtler politics . . . I see no reason why goddesses are not also cyborgs, although I take her point that a naturalistic romanticism/essentialism is not the answer to living in the high-tech world . . . As a feminist, I have no wish to contribute to homelessness in cyberspace; as a goddess and a cyborg I insist on it. (Star 2000 641–642)This paper seeks to insist the same, symptomatically and amplified.

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Consider the cyberspace to be a sea richer in resources than the land. One just has to plunge in and swim through to reap profits. Some, who have all the equipment for a dive, are ready to plunge in and explore. The simple solution, in that case, for those who do not have the equipment should have been to remain in the land and live the way they lived. That would really be simple. But the scene is different. The Cyberian Sea does not let that happen. It comes into existence by churning all geography. The Cyberian Sea floods all land, yet we will be able to see land. All land becomes the floor of the Cyberian Sea. One loses the choice of living on land. One does not have to dive into the Cyberian Sea, nor can one stay out of it. The Cyberian Sea dives over land at the call of those terrestrials who have grown fins. These terrestrials are cyborgs in the Cyberian Sea—exploring the same land, which is now the sea-floor, with more efficiency, reaping more out of it. The land that turned into a sea-floor has undergone one crucial change: its borders are dissolved; now, it is hyper-land. However, only cyborgs are hyper-mobile with their fins. And they are so few. Swarming millions of terrestrials who could not grow fins are suddenly immobile. Their relative speed is negligible. They can use their terrestrial organs in this hyper-land to dragging effects: they are hypo-mobile. They are banished from the hyper-activity of the Cyberian Sea. For the hyperactive, they become invisible. They are the finless fishes in the Cyberian Sea.

References Guillen, M.F., and S.L. Suarez. 2005. Explaining the Global Digital Divide: Economic, Political and Sociological Drivers of Cross-National Internet Use. Social Forces 84 (2): 681–708. Haraway, Donna. 2000. Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist Feminism in the late Twentieth century. The Cyberculture Reader. Eds. David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy. London and New York: Routledge. Horkheimer, M., and Adorno, Theodore. 2002. The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Standford: Standford University Press. James, Jeffrey. 2008. The Digital Divide across All Citizens of the World: A New Concept. Social Indicators Reasearch 89 (2): 275–282. McCarthy, Anna. 2002. Cyberculture or Material Culture? Computers and the Social Space of Work. Screens 15 (1/2): 47–63. Mcluhan, Marshall. 1964. The Medium is the Message. Understanding Media: The Extension of Man, Part I. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Natriello, Garry. 2001. Bridging the Second Digital divide: What Can Sociologists of Education Contribute? Sociology of Education 74 (3): 260–265. Poncet, P., and B. Ripert. 2007. Fractured Space: A Geographical Reflection on the Digital Divide. GeoJournal 68: 19–27. Ramesh, Babu P. 2004. Cyber Coolies in BPO: Insecurities and Vulnerabilities of Non-standard Work. Economic and Political Weekly 39 (5): 492–497. Sardar, Ziauddin. 2000. Alt.civilizations.Faq: Cyberspace as the Darker Side of the West. The Cyberculture Reader. Eds. David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy. London and New York: Routledge. Singh, Sumanjeet. 2012. Digital Divide in India: Measurement, Determinants and Policy for Addressing the Challenges in Bridging the Digital Divide. Digital Economy Innovations and Impact on Society. Bucharest: University of Bucharest, 106–130.

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Star, Susan Leigh: From Hestia to Home Page. 2000. Feminism and the Concept of Home in Cyberspace. The Cyberculture Reader. Eds. David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy.London and New York: Routledge. Stratton, Jon. 2000. Cyberspace and the Globalization of Culture. The Cyberculture Reader. Eds. David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy. London and New York: Routledge. Wade, Rbert H. 2002. Bridging the Digital Divide: New Route to Development or New Forms of Dependency? Global Governance 8: 443–466. Wallsten, Scott. 2005. Regulation and Internet Use in Developing Countries. Economic Development and Cultural Change 53 (2): 501–523.

Chapter 3

Surveillance as Norm Joshil K. Abraham

Abstract With the advent of sophisticated technology, there is a huge debate on the role of surveillance and its interference in ‘private’ life of people. The debate generally goes in a moralistic direction into the surveillance mechanisms intruding the life of people on one side and how surveillance can help prevent ‘terrorist’ activities and regulate conduct of people on the other. With the advent of computers and Internet, this anxiety over surveillance, which was limited to the panoptic gaze of humans and later onto cameras, has been extended into the realm of written exchanges of people. There are people in favour and others against surveillance as far as content on the Internet is concerned. This paper would go on to argue that such moralistic views, may it be in the case of cameras or Internet, are not possible. The reason for it is that surveillance is a widespread virus and therefore a norm. The spread of surveillance on Internet is such that more of less every alphabet and space buttons pressed by the user are being recorded and viewed. Thus, if we try to debate whether or not to control the limits of surveillance, we would be at a loss politically, as that is what the capitalist system wants the public to do: be caught up in trying to understand the means and ends of surveillance. This paper would go on to argue that we have to take surveillance as norm and thus its products as simulations. Such a view would be politically productive in combating capitalism as after using these surveillance mechanisms what the system would be left with would be heavy loads of data which cannot be classified or used. The desire of the system is to create a fear of surveillance, and thus, it is necessary for us to understand this as norm and not as an exception. Keywords Surveillance · Internet · Spying · Data surveillance · Personal privacy · Data privacy On April 30, 2019, Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, famously said that ‘the future is private’ (Ganjoo 2019). Few months after this declaration, Facebook attorneys argued in a US Court that whenever a user enters Facebook, they are considered to J. K. Abraham (B) G.B. Pant Engineering College, GGS Indraprastha University, New Delhi, India e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 S. Malhotra et al. (eds.), Inhabiting Cyberspace in India, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-9934-7_3

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have waived off their privacy rights, and hence, one cannot argue for the privacy of their data (Biddle 2019). The fact remains that Facebook and other Internet-based platforms collect our data enormously, use and sell it to different agencies. This paper attempts to analyse the surveillance activity that is said to be prominent in the present-day world which has Internet as one of the biggest means for surveillance. The debate that the paper would like to sprout is whether surveillance is a deviant or a norm. Let me start with a very short story. The story goes like this. A professor of JNU is asked by his daughter to start a Facebook account. He does so and becomes an active member. He does a lot of activity on Facebook—personal, social and political. He sits on Facebook till the late hours of midnight while his friends worry because of the time he spends on Facebook. One day one of his colleagues tells him that he wants to share some information and asked him not to ask for the source. The information is regarding the Intelligence Bureau tracking the professor’s daily activities and hence to deactivate his Facebook account. Now our Professor, unlike Kafka’s Joseph K. would have done, went on to deactivate his account. The story ends here, but the paper begins.

A Short History of Surveillance Let me track the debate a little backwards in time when the Internet was not there. We are well aware of the panopticon prisons where the prisoners are under constant surveillance of a panopticon tower which at times, or probably most of the times, can perform its task without a human presence. We are also aware of the patriarchal system which keeps track of every movement made by the female as well as male members of the society. We are also aware of the project of understanding normality and the reading of the unconscious which worked as a surveillance mechanism to correct and reinstate the desired normality of the society by terming some as mad and the others as normal. We are further aware of the CCTV cameras that facilitate the role of surveillance in public and private places. Present-day governments try to convince the public that they will install CCTV cameras in every nook and corner to stop crime. But they remain oblivious to the fact that people commit the crime in front of the CCTV camera and walk away with a smile on their face. The present-day mobile phone is yet another mechanism which does this job wisely. It is not probably a coincidence that declaration of demonetization and the growth of JIO mobiles in India happened at the same time. JIO provided free Internet to its customers for two reasons: to get them into the web and to track them and the data that emanates from them. One can keep piling on to this list. Though all these mechanisms of surveillance are rampant in the society that we live in, we tend to deny the fact that surveillance is a norm and seek refuge in ignorance, by casting surveillance as an exception. Now before coming to the issue of how the Internet uses surveillance, let me try to broadly discuss why the debate on the use and misuse of surveillance. I would like to argue that the debate is centred around the question on the good functioning of a just

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society! Let us first take the example of prisons. Here, the surveillance mechanism is hailed primarily due to two reasons: one that the prisoners are criminals and thus deserve severe punishment and second as they are prisoners and they should be kept in stress inside the prisons without any possibility of an exit. Now let me broadly discuss another phenomenon which is that of CCTV cameras in public and private places. There are arguments in favour and against CCTV cameras. The arguments in favour include that it can stop terrorist activity, eve-teasing, ‘anti-social’ activity like smoking, stealing from shops, destruction of public property, etc. The arguments against would include that it creeps into the private space as they keep taking footage of people in the city, tracking political activity and gatherings and not allowing young couples (in India) to express their love, etc. Now both the sides keep debating while the CCTV cameras stay in place taking snaps every second! When we enter a museum space, we are informed that the use of camera is prohibited, and at the same time, we are also informed that we are under the surveillance of CCTV cameras. It is an irony that one camera is banned and another camera is permitted. It could be due to power or due to a desire of being filmed that we never protest against this discrepancy. The camera is an instrument that has always remained a desirable object for humans. In certain ways, one can argue that people wish to be filmed and thus probably this lethargic ‘unconscious’ agreement/disagreement when it comes to CCTV surveillance. One can also push the argument that surveillance is desired. An example of how surveillance gets justified by its rejection could be understood by the analysis of a scene from the movie Dark Knight (2008) in which the character Lucius Fox played by Morgan Freeman tells Batman (Bruce Wayne) that he would do the job of tracking the entire city only once and after that he would resign owing to the moral crime that he has done. So here, the attempt is to say that surveillance mechanism is used for the good of the society and that there should be a commitment to safeguarding the liberal private space. Thereby, the claim that is made is that surveillance is an exception and not a norm. This same anxiety and reassurance of a surveillance-free society can be seen in the declaration of Tim Farron, the president of the Liberal Democrats in the UK. He says: I’m in no mood whatsoever to apologise for or to amend or unpick authoritarian legislation. It strikes me that a Liberal Democrat or a government that includes Liberal Democrats should ensure that Britain ends up a more liberal place, not less. Like many of us who are Liberals, [I was] very horrified by the original press reports about what the surveillance measures might lead to. There must be absolutely no question of universal Internet surveillance across this country. (Watt 2012)

Farron’s claim here is that ‘universal Internet surveillance across this country’ would not be allowed. So that leads to the question of partial surveillance (surveillance as an exception). Does the claim for partial surveillance holds at all?

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Tools of Surveillance Let me move on to the discussion of the Internet and I will start by discussing a software called TeamViewer which is used to help software technicians to repair laptops, desktops sitting in a remote location. As the team viewer website says, ‘TeamViewer connects to any PC or server around the world within a few seconds. You can remote control your partner’s PC as if you were sitting right in front of it’ (Software Select 2015). TeamViewer can be seen as an official surveillance mechanism that runs in your computer and allows the other person (who has the password access to your computer) to see the data on your computer (in the first place to repair it) and if the session is not stopped or if she/he is given unlimited access, to monitor all the activity done by you, keeping complete surveillance on your movements. Another software that one can commonly see is the DLL Net software that works in language labs which gives access to all the activity done by the student to the teacher so that she/he can monitor the activities and progress of the students. These are officially sponsored mechanisms of surveillance. Another type of software that is sold openly and acts as a family surveillance mechanism is Keyloggers, an example of which would be WebWatcher, which is said to help to monitor your child’s and spouse’s computer activity. It is also used by companies to monitor the employee’s activity. Married individuals who share computers with their spouses may be sharing more information than they anticipate. Thanks to the invention of surveillance software, anyone with suspicions about his or her spouse’s computer activities now has an inexpensive and technologically simple way to monitor every keystroke-every e-mail, every instant message, every document written, every website visited. Information formerly hidden from all but the most technologically advanced computer user is now readily available to anyone with $69.95 to spare. (Calman 2005)

We have also witnessed the attempt of the Indian state to register ‘all its citizens’ under the AADHAR cards so that the citizens have all their data in one card and thus access to a lot of things. I would like to note a comment made by a twelve-year-old boy when his parents asked him to come with them for registering for the AADHAR card: ‘I am not coming for that, Mamma. Is not this the same card which was used by the Rwanda government to hunt down Tutsi and Hutus?’.1 One can share the anxiety of the child but we are left in a world where these kinds of surveillance mechanism are innumerable and have different agendas. It would be quite striking to note that the Supreme Court of India found making AADHAR cards compulsory as an infringement on the privacy of an individual. Though the Supreme Court banned the collection of AADHAR card data by companies, its usage continues. Companies like Paytm tell the customers that for updating the KYC, they can either use AADHAR card and the counters for this will be available daily, or they can use other ID cards for which they will have to visit a particular office on one of the designated days in a week. Now Paytm has grown so much that it can tell the amount of milk that you purchase every day. 1 Shared

in a personal communication with the author. The child here is referring to the 1994 genocide in which the Tutsis were killed in large number.

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Let me move on to some surveillance software which is widely used on the Internet. These non-official surveillance mechanisms on the Internet can be broadly seen to belong to three types. The first type is that which engages with using personal information to feed into the advertising industries so that advertisements of the viewer’s choice can be given. The second type would be the ones that partake in identity thefts such as stealing email passwords and credit card passwords. The third type is the nation-state-sponsored worms which are used to get into the systems of other nation-states to monitor activities such as nuclear weapon construction. Fireball, Appearch, DollarRevenue, Gator, DeskAd, Zlob trojan, Zango, CoolWebSearch and HuntBar are some of the software, commonly known as Adware, that pertains to gaining information that can be used for advertisement purposes. Thus, the choices of the people are captured to give advertisements for products that need to be desired by the target consumer. Examples for the second type of viruses, commonly known as Spyware, which steals email passwords and credit card information, include Back Orfice, Netbus Trojans, Bugbear virus, Data-sending Trojan, proxy Trojan, etc. These viruses act in various ways such as asking you to install the software to stop popup windows, to stop advertisements, etc. But the moment you install these, you are entrapped into losing all the data (White 2009). The Stuxnet computer worm is an example of the third type of worm which is supposed to have been developed by USA and Israeli experts to primarily monitor Iranian industries to keep a check on the development of nuclear weapons (Hider 2011). This virus is said to have affected countries like Iran, Indonesia and India largely (D’Monte 2014).

Surveillance for Commercial and Political Interests The Cambridge Analytica controversy that happened in 2018 had exposed the huge nexus that some political parties had with the data management companies which they used in influencing the voters (Chang 2018). So, apart from defining the consumerist buying choices of individuals, data started getting used for defining their voting choices—hence defining democracy! So, Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms which had the innocent function of connecting people were secretly surveilling their customers (or rather objects) for some companies who were running democracies across the globe. Internet giants like Facebook and Google are surveilling on people to further their business interest by serving their commercial as well as political clients. But this surveillance has been now appropriated by the states directly to spy on their citizens. The Hong Kong police had used face recognition as a tool for identifying the protestors in 2019 (Mozur 2019). They had tried to use photographs available in various social media platforms to identify the protestors and later act against them. Mobile data and mobile phone location are used by various governments to spy on their citizens legally as well as illegally.

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It was reported by Huffington Post that ‘On October 30 2019, Facebook confirmed that Pegasus, a sophisticated snooping software developed by Israel’s NSO Group, was used to target Indian lawyers, and Dalit and Adivasi rights activists’ (Sethi 2019). Initially, the media reacted sharply against this Israeli origin software. But later, they all calmed their outrage against such surveillance, probably at the behest of the government, as it was widely accused by the activists that the government had used Pegasus to surveil on them as they were not working as per the wishes and ideology of the ruling establishment.

Surveillance for ‘common good’ With the Outbreak of the Corona Virus or Covid-19, governments across the globe have been busy tracking their citizen’s movement so that they can prevent the spread of the virus. Various strategies have been used to doing the same. Kerala, which is considered to have been effective in tackling the Covid-19 problem, managed to do it because it created tracking maps of patents who were detected with Covid-19 and quarantined all the contacts. But what is interesting is that there erupted a controversy regarding the data that the Kerala government was collecting from the patients. It was alleged that this was given to a company called Sprinklr (Onmanorama 2020). Data collection does not end with the Kerala government alone; the central government has gone a step further. Aarogya Setu is a new app that has been developed by the Indian government to collect travel information of citizens (or track their movement) so that they can prevent the spread of Covid-19 virus. But this, I argue, is nothing but an attempt of the state to have total surveillance on its citizens without any objection been raised by anybody as it has the disguise of being for a good cause of waging war against a pandemic! Similarly, drones have been used to track people who are assembling outside or travelling during the lockdown period. People who used to earlier wave their hands while seeing a drone are now running away with their faces covered so that they are not photographed. All in the name of the larger good! Mobile data using tower locations is being used by the police to trace the movements of Covid-19 patients, especially those who had attended the Tablighi Jamaat event that happened in Delhi in March 2020, days before the nation went into complete lockdown. It is being argued that the participants are unwilling to share the data of where all they went and hence this step of tracking through their mobile data. Such surveillance earlier required the consent of the person concerned or some serious charges against them which would allow the home ministry to order such tracking or surveillance. But now such things have become part of the routine exercises under the pretence that it is for the larger good. The question that needs to be answered is whether this surveillance that is done in the name of larger good will continue later also, and if so to what extent and till when.

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Surveillance and Media Journalism is probably one of the earliest legitimate surveillance mechanisms which were introduced into the world/market. It sometimes uses hidden cameras and does sting operations to bring out the ‘truth’. Countries spy on other countries, governments spy on private citizens, etc. are criticized when exposed through media. But how does media gets this news—by snooping and spying? The irony is that one snooping (of the journalist) delegitimizes the right of the other (government, nation). The reason for bringing this debate is not to argue that snooping is right or wrong, but to argue that snooping has always been a norm. What makes the snooping done by the journalists legitimate? It is simply that even before journalism, there existed widespread surveillance. Now some would have felt that it was important to control this snooping and thus advocated a body which would keep watch of the ‘illegal’ snooping. For others, it was important to have journalism so that they can over time legitimize their ‘illegal’ snooping through the ‘legal’ snooping that journalism does. At one level, it is the morality factor that plays in Journalism which legitimizes it and probably even argues that the journalist works for ‘discovering truths’, and this is not snooping but ‘curiosity’(a curiosity that the world and the journalist shares) or news. It is worthwhile to recall the BBC series Sherlock based on modern-day adventures of Sherlock Holmes. The episode titled His Last Vow is about a Charles Augustus Magnussen, a powerful media tycoon who is known for spying on people. He is under the scrutiny of the British Parliament, and he starts blackmailing a parliamentarian by showing some material he possesses on the misdeeds of her husband. Sherlock Holmes is requested by Lady Smallwood, the parliamentarian, to take on Magnusson. An interesting conversation happens When Holmes and Watson finally encounter Magnussen. It goes as given below: Magnussen: Knowing is owning. Watson: But if you just know it, then you don’t have proof. Magnussen: Proof? What would I need proof for? I’m in news, you moron. I don’t have to prove it, I just have to print it. (Sherlock 2014)

This demonstrates how spying and surveillance work in the field of journalism. It further demonstrates how business interest overrides ethics and surveillance becomes a legitimate tool to make money. Having charted some of the avenues where surveillance is maintained on the Internet, let me now move on to what would be the impact and role of surveillance and how it shapes and could shape future politics. The society, by and large, has always been involved in the construction of the normal-abnormal dichotomy which has led to moral and ethical questions of what to include and what not to. The state and the capitalist system have used this conflictual debate to further its project of stalling the political process. Now the debate on surveillance also tends to get furthered in the same direction of the moral and the ethical. The discussion is largely centred

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around understanding surveillance as a deviant and to imagine the world as normal. Any kind of surveillance activity is seen as abnormal, may it be seen as working for the good of the society or sometimes acting as bad and destructive. I would like to argue that surveillance is not a deviant or exception but a norm. This might sound like a paranoid statement. But rightly so, I would like to argue that the capitalist system that we are encompassed into is a paranoid one and that if we understand it as a normal one, we would be at a loss. As was explained in the discussion on the various types of surveillance mechanisms, it can be seen that there is no arena which is free to be ‘normal’. Thus, it would be productive to view surveillance as a norm. Now with an example, I would like to demonstrate how it would be productive to understand surveillance as a norm. There is a professor who uses her university email ID to send messages to her political friends on activities which would be taken as revolutionary by the capitalist system and the state. She believes that her university email ID cannot be monitored by the state due to legal restrictions. Her Gmail ID is maintained to make personal and social communications. Now as we had seen in the earlier discussion that spyware or the Stuxnet worm does not have a legalized statist origin which can be put under the scrutiny of law. Neither does software such as Pegasus. Thus, in such a circumstance what if the university account of the professor is monitored using this spyware? The result would be that she would be giving stratified information to the state, making the job easier for the state. This happens when she believes that surveillance is a deviant or an exception. Now if she understands that surveillance is a norm what would happen is that she would give non-stratified information. We have already witnessed countermodels of surveillance by Internet activists like Julian Assange who have threatened the system by showing that the threat of surveillance is not restricted to the non-state, non-capitalist players. Thus, now the arena of surveillance is shown to be extremely porous (it is just a realization and not a discovery). This could add on to the argument that surveillance is a norm and not an exception. If one could have gone on to the subversive use of surveillance and its potential, it should have been proved by the WikiLeaks enterprise, but as well-known now, there was an overload of information by WikiLeaks, and thus after the initial shock that it produced, it could not sprout larger outcomes. Thus, what could be done is to fill the system also with such an information overload which would make it a simulated database, thereby making it difficult for the system to decipher the overloaded information. This would prevent any easy attempt of the system to single out its ‘others’. It would be worthwhile to analyse what the Indian government did when they scrapped article 370 and bifurcated and downgraded the state of Jammu and Kashmir into union territories. The government decided to stop Internet and mobile services in the entire territory of Jammu and Kashmir. With normal logic, we must think that allowing mobile and Internet services would have helped the state in surveilling on the ‘citizens’. But the state thought otherwise. I would like to argue that the state felt that, as surveillance had become a norm in Jammu and Kashmir, especially Kashmir, surveillance using mobile and Internet data would not help. People knew to use these services to their benefit while the state went on collecting data. Hence, the state

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scrapped the Internet and mobile services. As a result, this made the people discover new methods of communication while the state went on using localized military surveillance. Hence, it is quite evident that we must not only bombard the system with a lot of data, we must also be cautious of the devices and the resources that we use for communication as they may be taken away one fine day by the state or the capitalist forces! Thus, it is necessary to treat surveillance as a norm, and it would be better not to get into the debate of whether it is good or bad. Taking surveillance as a norm, one must start to ‘play’ with it.

References Biddle, Sam. 2019. In Court, Facebook Blames Users for Destroying Their Own Right to Privacy. The Intercept. https://theintercept.com/2019/06/14/facebook-privacy-policy-court/. Accessed April 11, 2020. Calman, Camille. 2005. Spy vs. Spouse: Regulating Surveillance Software on Shared Marital Computers. Columbia Law Review: 2097–2134. Chang, Alvin. 2018. The Facebook and Cambridge Analytica Scandal, Explained with a Simple Diagram. Vox. https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/3/23/17151916/facebook-cambri dge-analytica-trump-diagram. Accessed April 11, 2020. Dark Knight. 2008. DVD. Directed by Christopher Nolan. Perf. Christian Bale, California: Warner Bros. Pictures. D’Monte, Leslie. 2014. Regin Trojan Spying on Countries Like India. Livemint. https://www. livemint.com/Industry/lZKRWzBafdcjOM1cZmEOrN/Regin-trojan-spying-on-countries-likeIndia.html. Accessed April 11, 2020. Ganjoo, Shweta. 2019. Mark Zuckerberg Says Future is Private But Facebook is Still Not Walking His Privacy talk. India Today. https://www.indiatoday.in/technology/talking-points/story/markzuckerberg-says-future-is-private-but-facebook-is-still-not-walking-his-privacy-talk-15164522019-05-03. Accessed April 11, 2020. Hider, James. 2011. Computer Virus Used To Sabotage Iran’s Nuclear Plans ‘Built by us and Israel’. The Australian. https://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/computer-virus-usedto-sabotage-irans-nuclear-plans-built-by-us-and-israel/news-story/08eaf40536d1a14ca4fb39db 2d396e7e. Accessed April 11, 2020. Mozur, Paul. 2019. In Hong Kong Protests, Faces Become Weapons. https://www.nytimes. com/2019/07/26/technology/hong-kong-protests-facial-recognition-surveillance.html. Accessed April 11, 2020. Onmanorama. 2020. Sprinklr Stays, Sub-Domain Changes and Kerala’s COVID-19 Data Won’t be Compromised. Onmanorama. https://english.manoramaonline.com/news/kerala/2020/04/13/ covid-kerala-cm-sprinklr-opposition.html. Accessed April 15, 2020. Sethi, Aman, and Gopal Sathe. 2019. Indian Govt. A Likely Culprit in WhatsApp Snooping Scandal, Pegasus Documents Show. HuffPost. https://www.huffingtonpost.in/entry/whatsapp-snoopingpegasus-documents-show-indian-government-likely-culprit_in_5dbbbd74e4b057bf506fa196? guccounter=1. Accessed April 11, 2020. Select Softwares Online India. 2015. Team Viewer. https://www.selectindia.com/Product/Produc tInfo.aspx?Id=TEAMVFH10001. Accessed April 11, 2020. Sherlock. 2014. The Last Vow, Netflix. Directed by Nick Hurran. Perf. Benedict Cumberbatch. Wales: BBC.

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Watt, Nicholas. 2012. Senior Lib Dem Threatens to Block Surveillance Plans. The Gaurdian. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2012/apr/08/senior-lib-dem-surveillance-plans. Accessed April 11, 2020. White, Mike. 2009. What is a Trojan Horse, and How Could it Steal Your Credit Card Information? Happy Living. https://www.happynews.com/living/online/trojans-steal-credit.htm. Accessed April 11, 2020.

Chapter 4

Cyberspace and the Illusions of Ultra-Democracy Prashant Gupta

Abstract There is an outpouring of newfound faith in communicative openings in cyberspace and the coming human conversation, beyond borders and ideologies. However, the new technologies could in fact pave the way for greater centralised control and surveillance, as well as the explosion of majoritarian sentiments. The dangers of ideological manipulation and a glut of inane textual production under the guise of citizen production of textuality is emphasized, along with the opportunities for governments and corporations to indulge in total surveillance and propagate a myth of public opinion. Keywords Cyberspace · Democracy · Marx · Neoliberalism · Hardware · IT sector In 1996, John Barlow wrote a manifesto declaring to the ‘governments of the Industrial Word’ that cyberspace was free from their sovereignty. This had become a familiar refrain by that time amongst a few technocratic dreamers. By 2004 Thomas Friedman was visiting India and was singing praises of India’s liberalization bearing fruit, extravagantly repeating that the third globalisation was happening in Bangalore. Barlow back then admonished the national governments: ‘Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project’ (Barlow 1996). Surely, he was not so naïve to think that a revolutionary transformation of every day was impending. He did think however that while our bodies will be ruled, we will ‘create a civilization of the Mind in cyberspace’. Anybody could enter this world of the mind without ‘privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth’. Extracted from a document titled “Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace” by John Perry Barlow, the above instances demonstrate the naivety of thinking that sees cyberspace as a new kind of space where new universal love can be declared, forgetting its origin in the blood of others. And, cyberspace cannot do this by technology of forgetting, but must work through constantly displaying the misery of the P. Gupta (B) OP Jindal Global University, Sonipat, India e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 S. Malhotra et al. (eds.), Inhabiting Cyberspace in India, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-9934-7_4

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world. It must splash victims of the real world, centrefold style, and leave us even more impotent, but exhilarated, computed into an orgy of textual transgression and bannered for an endless struggle for freedom of expression. Not everybody is in cyberspace though. Not in our part of the world. That is because we live not in the hegemonic environs of late capitalism, but with its constitutive open sores of severe ‘accumulation by dispossession’ (Harvey 2004). I would like to lay stress on ‘constitutive’, to rubbish notions of ‘lag’ that seems so beloved in theorising about Information Technology. The notion of ‘lag’ seems to naturalise the inequalities both at the international level as well as within the State in pursuit of capitalist progress. It also serves to deflect questions of the form that capitalist development takes in our part of the world. The idea is that if we manage to cover the overmentioned ‘Digital Divide’ we can catch up with development. What this formulation suppresses is that the divide is precisely what constitutes the shape and form of Information Technology unfolding in India. The notion helps to cast the victims of capitalist development as the ones left behind in a race. It calls slaves losers in the race. It turns a bloody constitution of the Information Technology ecosystem into a starting line. Cyberculture, Information Age, Universal Access, Information Superhighway, Knowledge Society, Post-Industrial Society, Network Culture- new words keep coming thick and fast (Benkler 2007). Indeed, it seems that older problems of class, caste, and race would disappear with the proliferation of new identities in the virtual world. This is probably the rude end of such theorising. There is, however, a tendency to overstate the case of the ‘Human.’ There is an outpouring of newfound faith in communicative openings in cyberspace and the coming human conversation, beyond borders and ideologies. Many a new theory of unencumbered textuality also seems to suggest the liberating potential of hypertext. The reader is empowered and this presents a challenge to both centralisation and majoritarianism. The reader is empowered to write on and link texts. This makes the readers read in an even more powerful way. The reader can annotate documents, dialogue with texts, and leave their own traces. Perhaps the reader can write the ‘Logos’: “As long as any reader has the power to enter the system and leave his or her mark, neither the tyranny of the center nor that of the majority can impose itself.” (Landlow 2012). I suggest that it could very well be the opposite. The new technologies could in fact pave the way for greater centralised control and surveillance, as well as the explosion of majoritarian sentiments. What if all our traces and marks that we can now so conveniently inscribe upon the fabric of textuality turn out to be the very locus of tyranny? There is the slip from ‘text’ to ‘system’ in the quote from Landlow. This is symptomatic of the separation of ‘Equality’ from ideas of ‘Democracy’. Entering the text and the fact of its open-endedness symbolize here the resistance to the domination of ideology. In its forgetting of the political economy of state and systemic power, this language substitutes ‘equality’ with an imagined democracy of free expression and interpretation. While these values are indispensable to the struggle for ‘Equality’, they are mostly used now to avoid or disparage the idea.

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Two lines of thought will be pertinent to explore here. First, the unfolding of the Information Technology revolution needs to be analysed by paying attention to political economy. One can look at Saskia Sassen’s research on the impact of neoliberal globalisation and how the universal connectivity and speed of communication technologies produce massive concentrations of wealth (1996). Many others have also written on the symbiosis between networked technologies and the advent of neoliberalism. Second, the dangers of ideological manipulation and a glut of inane textual production under the guise of citizen production of textuality is emphasized, along with the opportunities for governments and corporations to indulge in total surveillance and propagate a myth of public opinion. This, at a time when opinion and thought is ever more malleable to control confusion and conspiracy.

Born into Neoliberalism As mentioned earlier, the coming of cyberculture to our part of the world is woven along with the form that the cruelty of capitalism in its neoliberal phase takes in India. To begin with, cyberspace stands on a massive underlay of hardware. From mining to plastics, many other industries feed into the production of this hardware. These industries overwhelmingly operate in labour extractive modes. Only a forgetting of this infrastructure requirement gives the software industry the sheen of ‘knowledge work.’ This new kind of work it seems is untainted with the scenarios of productive industries. Software production is in fact a very thin absorber of labour and a big guzzler of subsidies and capital (Athreye 2005). It overwhelmingly benefits a small section of the population, mostly a section of the middle and upper-middle classes. The software and hardware industries are privately owned from the word go and act as cheerleaders for and lobbyists of capitalist efficiency. Also, electronics hardware production in India is quite weak and most of the hardware needs are met through imports. There is a concentration of capital in the technology sector. There are already enough indications that this generates a speculative asset bubble. Consider as an example, how there exist ever mushrooming NGOs who claim that Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) will save the day for the rural farmer, where ironically the keyword is ‘market access’. So, rural distress which is ongoing for more than a decade now is recast as needing a technological fix for improving information services and market access. While it attempts at furthering ‘efficiency,’ it leaves labouring classes on the shores and renders a large number of agricultural labourers useless, without there being any chances of finding decent employment elsewhere. If a Brechtian poem had to be written about cyberspace – in the order of ‘Who built Thebes of Seven Gates?’ – the answer would be ‘the Private Sector’. On the exclusive highway of information society, the buzz amongst the new humanists is ‘Digital Divide’. It seems already that the mobile phone is being seen as the magic object that will overcome this divide. The question of digital divide is a question of infrastructure and capitalism. Here, the notion of digital divide tends to ignore the

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question by merely focusing on a ‘divide’ that is to be bridged, a natural divide, rather than the terrible legality of capital under which the new paradigm of communication is born. Zizek tells us that, in the social conditions of late capitalism, the very materiality of cyberspace automatically generates the illusory abstract space of ‘friction-free’ exchange in which the particularity of the participants’ social position is obliterated (1997).

We must see that the materiality of cyberspace is the world of neoliberal capitalism whose mean face we are trying to uncover. Cyberspace is already where they are trying to shift education to—the conversion of a public right and public resource into a commodity. Cyberspace access is already a commodity—the name of this commodity in our own time is ‘connection’ and with the mobile phone it is ‘charge’. It is almost as if the entry into the beautiful world of human interaction is a ticketed event. Let us look at the unfolding of Information Technology in India, and analytically see it as a key element of neoliberalism. A whole mythology has sprung up around the IT phenomenon. Apart from being the runaway economic success with its steep profits and share in the GDP, it seems the industry is typically modern. It is far removed from the morass of caste and is a major employment generator. All you need to shine is Merit. We will explore later how this formulation is, in fact, Casteist and has its roots in the anti-reservation ethos of professional colleges. It is also distinguished from traditional businesses with their nepotistic lineages. Stories of CEOs and startups of bright middle-class origin have become legendary. The IT industry has become the exemplary story of the potency of private industryled development and dovetails with prescriptions for further neoliberal economic reform and privatisation of education. The words that encapsulate this myth are ‘innovation’, ‘development’, and ‘reform’ (Government of India 2003). It is a frothy canard hanging from the lips for ready articulation. Consider how the budget in 2007 led to entitled complaints from the leaders of IT industry. The touted move for software development to be brought under the tax net, left the IT industry dismayed at the announcement. This proposal in the budget was an insult to the IT and ITeS (IT-enabled services) sector, they felt. Our beloved new technology industry, with its stellar growth charts, and its employment generation miracle, being targeted by ghosts of protectionism. The fact is that there is no justification, other than the transfer of capital to a certain class of people, for providing massive tax sops to the ‘sunshine’ industry. Are then, the fat GDP and profit margins that the meritorious software engineers and techno-entrepreneurs boast of, a result of dismantling state control and unleashing of innovative energies? Is it the neoliberal economic model, with its mantra of maximum governance minimum government, that has freed up our engineers to build a new ‘Identity’ for third-world India? To begin with, this is not only false but quite ironically so too. The state has always played a hand-holding role in the IT industry. Borrowed from the idea of

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Special Manufacturing Zones, the Software Technology Parks and Special Economic Zones dedicated to the IT industry were significant drivers (Balakrishnan 2006). Technical Education in India had for many decades been heavily subsidised, and this was the workforce that first entered the profession as developers and in management positions (Parthasarathy 2005). The irony of this very workforce becoming convinced of themselves as the vanguard of a technology-enabled India that was leaving its ‘welfare state’ past behind is only too apparent. Those who received their higher education in public institutions have now ironically become the strident votaries of privitisation. About employment in the IT sector proper, the less said the better. The NASSCOM report of 2004, estimates that the demand for IT professionals could go up to ‘2.5 million by FY2011 if the current growth trends hold’ (NASSCOM 2004). This is a tiny figure compared to the kind of profits and turnover that the industry generates. Why is this not remarked upon? An answer can be found in the composition of the workforce in the software industry. The employment scenarios, especially the well-paying jobs (rather than administrative, logistical, support jobs, etc.), are overwhelmingly pre-hacked to profit a middle-class minority (Krishna and Brihmadesam 2006). Let us look at the general employment trends and statistics before going further into the disparity between employment generation and capital turnover. Wage employment in India has declined over the years quite significantly. It is generally accepted across the political spectrum that the rise in the rate of employment growth in the last decade is a result of a significant increase in the number of selfemployed. The difference is that some see this as a good thing. To them, it represents the entrepreneurial energy that has been unleashed after the fetters of central planning and government social spending were removed. There is an entire language dedicated to heap insult on welfare spending and government control of the market. The real factor driving self-employment in India is, in fact, distress. It is the inability to find jobs and employment that have driven people to self-employment which in upper sections of society become entrepreneurship. These self-employed, who are driven to work for themselves because they cannot find decent employment get no seeding finance from banks and other credit institutions (Chandrashekhar and Ghosh 2007). Such self-employment, born of distress, means that they work inhuman hours with uncertain incomes and the imperative to hire other precarious workers to keep going. This is the truth hiding behind languages of knowledge economy, digital futures and so on, which seem oblivious to the poor employability of the industry (Rothboeck et al. 2001). It may be said that ‘constitutive’ of the rise of the IT industry is the economic decline of agriculture. It is the same movement of neoliberalism that while it creates a high-value low employment IT industry, it decimates agriculture and turns it into a low-value labour-intensive industry. Also, these figures about the rise in ‘Entrepreneurial Employment’ have to be read with the figures on unemployment and the general rise in labour productivity in many sectors. With the general rise in labour productivity, the increase in the size of the economy is offset by an increase in the size of what Marx called the ‘reserve army of labour’. According to Marx, the surplus labouring population is a necessary product of acccumulation’. The surplus population becomes ‘conversely, the lever

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of capitalistic accumulation, nay, a condition of existence of the capitalist mode of production’ (Marx 1867). The spoils of success of a growing economy, of more accumulation of capital, are very stingily channeled even to workers in the formal economy, which never keeps pace with the increase in working population. Though, the thin layer of those working in decent jobs in the IT sector has had it bright. This is quite clear and apparent given that the tales of these professionals being ‘placed’ and working in ‘foreign shores’ have become common language. So, who are these ‘Professionals’? And who are the captains of this industry? What is the role that class/caste background plays in determining who will be the well-paid employees (they are not called workers after all and nor do they self-designate like that)? The quantum of jobs generated by the IT sector in India is not significant, especially when compared to its disproportionate share in the GDP. Its profit margins, therefore, find much less numbers to be divided amongst. The contribution of the IT sector to exports is quite high and is increasing by the year. It is obvious that a large amount of capital is being accumulated by small and privileged sections of Indian society. This privilege in India maps quite cleanly on fissures of caste/Class and even religion. The IT industry is also characterized by monopolies by some large players, while many small and medium-sized firms serve either as ancillaries or specialized units. These new companies, a minuscule of whom did grow into gigantic enterprises like Infosys, were skewed in their ownership in terms of caste and Class. It was almost always people of middle/upper classes and dominant caste backgrounds who seeded and ran these companies. Many of them studied at statesubsidised institutions like the IITs (Indian Institute of Technology) and were at the beginning of their careers themselves employed in technology firms. These highly coveted places were rabidly anti-reservation and rued bitterly the few seats reserved for oppressed castes. With the benefits of neoliberalism starting to become apparent these higher education spaces became animated with vitriol towards welfare policies, the so-called ‘Nehruvian Socialism’ (Deshpande and Yadav 2006). The IT workforce is much more socially homogenous than is often claimed. The workforce is dominated by the middle-class, the upper and middle castes, and those with an urban background. There are many employees from small towns and even villages, but this should not be seen as inclusiveness. These employees are also mostly from the dominant Brahmin and landowning castes (Upadhya 2004). In fact, most new and well-paying jobs that are created have a tendency to be gobbled up by more privileged sections of society, who then fetishize the idea of ‘merit’ to justify this disproportionality. It turns out that the common assumptions and notions about equitable social employment in the IT industry are not so accurate after all. The idea that the IT industry is a great engine of employment generation is also quite misleading and is used quite insidiously to justify all the special privileges accorded to the industry and the gargantuan amounts of subsidy by various means. The IT industry therefore has had an impact on public policy, which is out of proportion to its said marvels in terms of employment and absence of prejudice. It is additionally helping most industries

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to become leaner in terms of labour and more expansive in terms of combinatory enterprise. The skill upgrading required in the wake of digitalisation and integration of computers in the processes of industry also works more in favour of privileged castes. Turning higher education into a commodity with privatisation of education makes matters worse (Deshpande 2006).

The Political Possibilities Let us talk now about the constellation of what one could call ‘political possibilities’ and the forces that foreclose these possibilities that are opened up with the coming of the internet. Cyberspace, seems has democratised the process of textual production and also is leading to the inclusion of the excluded in civic dialogue. This is apparently leading to a more informed citizenry, and we will see the results in some time (Negroponte 1996). This seems like an increasingly dubious proposition. While it cannot be denied that a possibility of a more involved and democratic dialogue opens up in cyberspace technically, the historical mode of production under which this technology unfolds, i.e. Neoliberalism, severely restricts these possibilities. We could refer to Jodi Dean’s idea of ‘Communicative Capitalism’ to understand this predicament. According to Jodi Dean, the concept of communicative capitalism appears to imply the coming together of democracy and capitalism. Ideas of dialogue, communication without restraint, freedom of speech, and participation are central to the notion of democracy. These values seem to be realised in cyberspace, much like John Barlow’s manifesto fantasied. This of course is a potent myth: Ideals of access, inclusion, discussion, and participation come to be realized in and through expansions, intensifications, and interconnections of global telecommunications. (Dean 2006)

As stated earlier, a new language has come about to replace ideas of economic democracy and social justice. Words like access, participative democracy, digital democracy, etc., help in making sure that the neoliberal project is supported by the infrastructure of communicative capitalism. Textual production is on its way to becoming atomised and individualised. Online communities and interactions can help with gathering resistance on the streets but at the same time are largely ephemeral. Instead of realising solidarity, it might stymie collaboration for resistance. The turning of civic responsibility into the atomised production of opinions on the internet could operate as a fetish in place of the real. What if instead of solidarity and universal intercourse of ‘people’, most of the internet textual production is a sign of furthering alienation of a diseased social order. This new cyberworld will centre stage consumer needs. It will produce new forms of individualistic subjectivity, where the production of online personalities and the consumption of a glut of textuality will redefine leisure time. The glut of textual production belongs to the category of inanities, canned laughter, pornography and voices of right-wing extremists and all kinds of xenophobes. There could be a plague

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of misinformation (this seems already to be the case) rather than the democratisation of knowledge. The mobile phone seems to exacerbate these tendencies rather than democratise knowledge and dialogue. This device set to become ever more convergent, in fact, will be captured by the infrastructure of right-wing, xenophobic, sexist and racist organisations who will have cyber soldiers spreading filth, and textual self-production will mostly turn towards pornography, inanity, and reproduction of standard right-wing extremist ideologies. It will also lead to extreme surveillance and the persecution of those who dare still speak of real democracy.

References Athreye, Suma S. 2005. Human Capital, Labour Scarcity and Development of the Software Services Sector. In ICTs and Indian Economic Development: Economy, Work, Regulation, eds. A. Saith and M. Vijayabaskar. New Delhi. Sage Publications. Benkler, Yochai. 2007. The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. Yale UP: New Haven and London. Balakrishnan, Pulapre. 2006. Benign Neglect or Strategic Intent? Contested Lineage of Indian Software Industry, Economic and Political Weekly 41 (36): 3865–3872. Barlow, John Perry. 1996. A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. https://www.eff.org/ cyberspace-independence. Accessed December 26, 2011. Chandrashekar, C.P., Jayati Ghosh. 2007. Recent Employment Trends in India and China: An Unfortunate Convergence. Paper presented at ICSSR-IHD-CASS Seminar, 28–30 March 2007. New Delhi. Dean, Jodi. 2006. Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics. London: Duke University Press. Deshpande, Satish. 2006. Exclusive Inequalities: Merit, Caste and Discrimination in Indian Higher Education Today. Economic and Political Weekly 41 (24): 2438–2444. Deshpande, Satish, and Y. Yadav. 2006. Redesigning Affirmative Action: Castes and Benefits in Higher Education. Economic and Political Weekly 41 (24): 2419–2424. Government of India. 2003. Report of Task Force on Meeting the Human Resources Challenge for IT and IT Enabled Services. New Delhi: Ministry of Communications and Information Technology. Department of Information Technology. Government of India. Harvey, David. 2004. The ‘New’ Imperialism: Accumulation by Dispossession. Socialist Register 40: 63–87. Krishna, Anirudh, and Vijay Brihmadesam. 2006. What Does it Take to Become a Software Professional? Economic and Political Weekly 41 (30): 3307–3314. Landlow, George P. 2012. Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology. Baltimore: John Hopkins UP. Marx, Karl. 1867. Capital, vol. I. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch25.htm. Accessed December 26, 2011. NASSCOM. 2004. Strengthening the Human Resource Foundation of the Indian IT Enabled Services/IT Industry. KPMG-NASSCOM Report. New Delhi: Department of IT. Ministry of Information Technology and Communications. Government of India. Negroponte, Nicholas. 1996. Being Digital. New York: Vintage Books. Parthasarathy, B. 2005. The Political Economy of the Computer Software Industry in Bangalore, India. In ICTs and Indian Economic Development; Economy, Work, Regulation, eds. A. Saith and M. Vijaybaskar. New Delhi. Sage Publications. Rothboeck, S., M. Vijaybaskar, and V. Gayathri. 2001. Labour in the New Economy; The Case of the Indian Software Labour Market. International Labour Organisation: New Delhi. Sassen, Saskia. 1996. Losing Control? New York: Columbia University Press.

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Upadhya, Carol. 2004. A New Transnational Capitalist Class? Capital Flows, Business Networks and Entrepreneurs in Indian Software Industry. Economic & Political Weekly 39 (48): 5141–5151. Upadhya, Carol. 2007. Employment, Exclusion and ‘Merit’ in the Indian IT Industry. Economic & Political Weekly 42 (20): 1863–1868.

Part II

Cyber-Politics: The New Media and Alternative Modes of Resistance

Chapter 5

Digital Feminist Interventions: A Critical Assessment of the Pink Chaddi Campaign and #MeToo in India Sapna Dudeja

Abstract The Pink Chaddi Campaign (PCC) was launched in 2009, and #MeToo has gained momentum in 2018 in India. While the first has run its full course, the second is like a sleeping volcano, waiting to erupt as and when the pressure mounts. They both have changed the digital landscape and its uses in the Indian context. While one was a much smaller movement in scope and reach, the later has managed to shook civil society out of its complacency. Both, the former to a lesser and the latter to a much greater degree have succeeded in mainstreaming the discourse on genderbased violence, launching a conversation, democratizing the spread of information, impressing that instances of sexual violence are not individual, isolated incidents, exposing the larger systemic nature of gendered violence world over, connecting people across boundaries, creating transnational solidarities and showing that sexual violence is endemic and ubiquitous. The current paper aims to critically analyse the two and answer questions like: What have they achieved, what has made them successful, what have been their shortcomings or limitations, what is their relevance in the Indian context in the long run and what is the way forward. The paper concludes that cyberspace has tremendous potential to be appropriated for progressive causes 1 The Pink Chaddi Campaign (henceforth referred to as the PCC) was initiated by Nisha Susan in response to the attacks on women in Mangalore pubs by members of the right-wing organization Sri Ram Sena on 24 January 2009. Several women were attacked in subsequent days by similar right-wing units across the country. Susan formed a group called ‘A Consortium of Pub-Going, Loose and Forward Women’ on Facebook on 5 February 2009 and another one called ‘The Pink Chaddi Campaign’ on Orkut as well to urge people to send ‘Pink Chaddis’ to Pramod Muthalik, the chief of Sri Ram Sena. The campaign was hugely successful as thousands of Chaddis reached the chief’s office, significantly unsettling him and his staff. 2 #MeToo was launched by Tarana Burke in 2006 in order to empower women through empathy and solidarity building. Alyssa Milano, an American actress, reignited the debate in 2017, subsequent to which it became a global event. In 2018, Tanushree Dutta, former Indian actress, became the face of the movement in India. 3 Though the PCC has run its full course and should be referred to in the past tense, its repercussions and significance (just like #MeToo) continue into the present. Therefore, the present/present perfect tense has been used to refer to both the movements together.

S. Dudeja (B) Department of English, Dyal Singh Evening College, University of Delhi, New Delhi, India e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 S. Malhotra et al. (eds.), Inhabiting Cyberspace in India, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-9934-7_5

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and that such movements can become revolutionary interventions only when they have the lowest common denominator at their centre, not at their periphery.

The Pink Chaddi Campaign (PCC)1 was launched in 2009, and #MeToo2 has gained momentum in 2018 in India. While the first has run its full course, the second is like a sleeping volcano, waiting to erupt as and when the pressure mounts. They both have changed3 the digital landscape and its uses in the Indian context. While one was a much smaller movement in scope and reach, the later has managed to shook civil society out of its complacency. Both, the former to a lesser and the latter to a much greater degree have succeeded in mainstreaming the discourse on genderbased violence, launching a conversation, democratizing the spread of information, impressing that instances of sexual violence are not individual, isolated incidents, exposing the larger systemic nature of gendered violence world over, connecting people across boundaries, creating transnational solidarities and showing that sexual violence is endemic and ubiquitous. These feminist interventions in cyberspace exemplify what Nancy Fraser, drawing upon as also moving beyond Habermas’ idea of the public sphere, calls ‘subaltern counterpublics’ or ‘parallel discursive arenas where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counter discourses, which in turn permit them to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests and needs’ (1990). These movements also instantiate what Sarah J. Jackson and Brooke F. Welles, combining Fraser’s notion of the ‘subaltern counterpublics’ and Manuel Castells’ notion of the network society, conceptualize as the ‘networked counterpublics’ (2015). These movements have provided a permanent online space to people to engage in a dialogue, generate a counter discourse of resistance, connect, share, organize and protest. The networked nature of the digital space has enabled these campaigns to transcend regional, ethnic, geographical boundaries, expand their scope and reach and achieve rapid mobilization at low costs. The speed and magnitude afforded by the medium have allowed these campaigns to run ‘wild’, challenging dominant narratives, raising consciousness, enabling participants to share lives and experiences, calling for change, consolidating a collective voice of women. Elizabeth Brunner and Sarah Partlow-Lefevre also highlight how these ‘wild public networks’ offer an alternative to Habermas’ public sphere— an imagined space wherein rational public debate among citizens takes place—by radically reconceptualizing rhetorical processes, revealing not rational debate but largely affective pleas in the form of GIFs, images, and impassioned responses, privileging images over text, which are immediate, reactive, and not always well reasoned from an argumentation perspective, yet they are powerful in creating social shifts and changes to affective valences. Twitter, they add, like many of its social media counterparts, plays on heightened emotions, often drawing users into interactions with strangers from vastly different contexts (2020). Brunner and Lefevre also argue that the #MeToo is significant for ‘resisting contemporary image practices within an ocularcentric media landscape’ and for making possible ‘a rhizomatically networked

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collective,’, that is, an amorphous composition of users connected through various strong and weak ties, across national boundaries and various medias, simultaneously united and dispersed and personal and anonymous (2020). On the one hand, this ‘wildness’ has made these movements open, inclusive narratives, inviting participation. On the other, it has made them too amorphous, often losing sight of real objectives and real questions, not who did what, who wore what, how and where it happened but real political questions about gender relations in our society: What are young boys taught from a tender age, what kind of stories, fairy tales do our children feed on, why do our mythologies portray women and other genders in certain ways, what kind of games are seen as befitting as per perceived gender roles and why, why dowry, why female infanticide, why eve-teasing, why female-genitalia specific abusive terminology, why is sex education not part of our school curriculum, how do certain boys grow up into apathetic men, lacking basic gender sensitivity and empathy, why should power and privilege always lead to destruction and not creation, serving, building, who do our laws protect and serve and can easy availability of paid sex deter sexual predatoriness. In short, to interrogate the very socio cultural processes that leads to harrassment and sexual violence. It is only when we expose the institutionalized, subtle forms of discrimination that women disproportionately experience, the everyday occurrence of sexist violence that we can, possibly, prevent extreme instances of the same. The seemingly harmless quotidian experiences of sexual discrimination pave the way for more serious violations. Asking the right questions also means locating the workings of power in its everyday forms, in the personal space of one’s house, to focus on the everyday phenomenon of the reproduction of cultural relations of gender in our societies, to be able to connect the personal, the individual, the microcosmic with the political, the collective, the macrocosmic and to be able to see how one feeds into the other. Ethical change at the level of the individual combined with political change at the legal level is the way forward. One without the other is incomplete. Both personal belief systems and the structures that facilitate such inequalities need to be fixed. The ideological processes that ensure compliance and complicity from the subjects of this elaborate machinery need to be exposed. The cumulative effect of generating complicity in everyday microaggressions, symbolic as well as epistemic violence, serves the purpose of normalizing and legitimizing more intense physical violations. Gayatri C. Spivak talks about strategic essentialism, a political tactic in which minority groups, nationalities or ethnic groups mobilizes on the basis of shared gendered, cultural or political identity to represent themselves, as a possible solution. But reducing these issues to identity politics only takes one further away from the roots of the problem. With identity politics comes taking sides and defending that side, no matter what, most often at cost of asking the real questions, reducing the sociocultural conflicts into one-upmanship. An excessive emphasis on identity for politics means one ends up collaborating with the system, fighting with one another while the system that is responsible for oppressing all continues unchallenged. There is a need to repoliticize debates on sexism by exposing the structural nature of sexual violence, by exposing gender as a sociocultural construct that serves those in power to not just consolidate power but also reproduce relations of power. Judith Butler’s

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notion of sex as a biological category, gender as a cultural construct and Simone de Beauvoir’s famous statement that, one is not born, but rather, becomes a woman, seem extremely useful here. These movements have provided its participants with the much needed strength that comes with collective action. Further harassment of women at the front line of these protests only shows that men feel threatened, seek to silence further, often with rape or death threats. Women who choose to speak are perceived as the problem, not the men that harass. Sara Ahmed opines, ‘to name the problem is to be positioned as the problem’ (qtd. In Heather Savigny 2020). So when a woman chooses to speak against a man, she is actually up against a whole system and risks being categorized as either a hero or a hysterical slut, a brave survivor or an opportunist attention seeker. Who gets categorized as one or the other, besides who speaks and does/not get heard also depends on one’s locational advantage. Dubravka Zarkov, in conversation with Kathy Davis, states that, ‘Yes, who speaks and who is heard remains crucial! Today the most visible #MeToo women are powerful: rich and famous celebrities, well-known TV personalities, journalists, and members of political elites. The fact that they are famous and that many are speaking at the same time, makes all the difference in allowing their accusations to be heard and believed’ (2018). The politics of location plays itself out along the lines of class, caste, race, religion, ethnicity and so on, to the extreme disadvantage of a collective feminist struggle, in the Indian context. In a scathing critique of the #metoo and savarna feminism, Christina Thomas Dhanraj argues that savarna Indian feminists spearheading the #metoo campaign in India display selective outrage for sexual crimes regardless of the magnitude or scale of the crime and are in fact complicit with savarna men in inflicting sexual crimes on Dalit women: ‘We’ve faced microaggressions that are aplenty when engaging with savarna women. We’ve also been killed, sabotaged, harassed, and illtreated by them’ (2018). She argues that the empathy gap, characterized by caste, class, religion and everything else, is just too wide for savarna feminists to cross even to register protest that any status quo change on their part is only intended to include rather than have DBA [Dalit Bahuja Adivasi] women as leaders, that savarna women practise feminism by riding on the backs of marginalized women who work for them as nannies and house helps, that Hindu feminists are not willing to interrogate their religion’s oppressive ideologies, that savarna feminists treat marginalized women as ‘subjects’ of their research under the mask of collaboration, only project solidarity but back out at the time of real action, that real intersectionality, real revolution must have DBA women at the centre and not at the periphery. The mundaneness, the ordinariness, of gendered violence for DBA women is backgrounded in this kind of feminist hashtag activism. This miniscule cultural elite population is not representative of what happens to the lives of the marginal population in instances of sexual harassment or rape and excludes far more than it claims to represent. Manuel Castells also argues that the great digital divide, the blackholes of informational capitalism that characterize our increasingly technologized and networked lives, ensures systemic exclusion of racial, sexual, class, ethnic, religious and caste minorities (2000). Ziauddin Sardar also points out that, ‘Internet access is an expensive luxury… One can feed a family of four in Bangladesh for

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a whole year for that sort of money…. In the Third World… only the reasonably well-off can afford access to the Internet. That leaves most of humanity at the mercy of real reality…. So most of the people on the Internet are white, upper-and middleclass Americans and Europeans; and most of them, are men… less than one per cent of the people on-line are women’ (2000). On the one hand, when the rich and the famous speak, the world listens. On the other, more than ever, digital technologies are being used for control through surveillance by repressive governments, posing threat to personal security, persecution, dataveillance, arrest, data theft and cybercrime. Manal Al-Sharif, co-founder and leader of the #Women2Drive campaign in Saudi Arabia, points out that just weeks before the ban on women drivers was lifted in Saudi Arabia, some of the activists who had campaigned for it were detained by the government (2018). The PCC and #MeToo, however, foreground the idea of ‘sousveillance’4 or counter surveillance or surveillance from below, exposing, shaming perpetrators of sexual violence, denting the public image of powerful men, sometimes their careers, even though temporarily so. Such disciplinary mechanisms, one could say, have the potential to instil a fear of exposure, which could act as a deterrent for some men. More importantly, these movements have helped shift the responsibility of gendered, sexual crime and also proving one’s innocence on the perpetrator, for a change. But, using counter surveillance and exposing an individual are not equal to exposing the problem. Though punishing an individual has a cathartic effect, it leads to the assumption that all is well with the society. Focusing energies on punishing an aberrant individual happens at the cost of diverting critical attention away from working at the roots of the problem, and purging the system of an ‘error’ is illusory because the system is erroneous as such. The system ‘sacrifices’ these erroneous individuals and succeeds in maintaining the illusion of a perfectly healthy machinery. Further, punishing an individual in the name of morality is locating a problem where it does not exist and further refusing to acknowledge the systemic nature of gender inequality. Also, what if that individual happened to be innocent of the crime had to undergo ‘trial by media’, suffer trauma and severe consequences before even having a chance to defend himself? So, the moment we shift our focus away from the system to the individual, there is a certain depoliticization of such movements. Also, individualizing and simplifying the issue of sexual violence in binary frameworks men/victimizers/predators versus women/victims/preys fail to foreground the nuances, ambiguities and contradictions that real-life sexual relations in our societies afford. Such simplifications further serve to deny women agency, freedom of choice and action and portray them as powerless subjects of male violence. A perception of such an absolute antagonism between the sexes and homogenization of each serves 4 Steven

Mann, a Canadian Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, coined the term ‘sousveillance’ to describe watchful vigilance from underneath. Ethan Zuckerman, a Professor at MIT, refers to sousveillance as the monitoring of authority figures by grassroots groups, using the technologies and techniques of surveillance.

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the system more than challenging it by precluding the possibility of multiple liberatory paradigms. Interestingly, the construction, validation and promotion of these binaries serve everyone’s purpose: of other men who can easily argue ‘not all men’; of women who can identify, blame, castigate, punish; of society that can purge itself of the ‘no longer serviceable’ part of its machinery, one that has become a liability and must be ‘sacrificed’ so that the larger mechanism remains undisturbed. But it is precisely for these reasons that we need to deconstruct these binaries. A nonbinaristic and collaborative approach would be more constructive to address real issues. Sexism is so deeply entrenched in our systems that sexual harassment appears a much smaller issue in the wake of ever increasing sexual crimes against women, children of both sexes, transgenders, even animals in India. In our country, a miniscule percentage of rape cases are reported, still fewer found guilty and punished. Many rape victims end up committing suicide, a fair number murdered after being raped. The survivors deciding to take legal recourse have an uphill task in the face of male dominated prejudiced systems that further persecute, shame and abandon them. Shareen Joshi articulates, ‘The arrival of the #MeToo moment was not a huge surprise. India is one of the most gender unequal societies in the world. India is ranked 130 out of 155 countries on the Gender Inequality Index, an aggregate measure constructed by the United Nations’ Human Development Report that takes into account reproductive health, empowerment, and economic activity. India has one of the lowest female labour force participation rates in the world. Only 27% of Indian women work in the formal sector, and this number has been declining in recent years. India’s male to female sex ratio remains heavily male, suggesting systematic discrimination against girls, even in the richest districts and states of the country. Moreover, India’s rape statistics, though low by international standards, appear to be rising rapidly. A recent, albeit controversial, report by Thomson Reuters argues that India is one of the most unsafe countries for women in the world’ (2019).

We are living in a country where female genital mutilation is still prevalent, where rape of minor Dalit girls is institutionalized through religious practices like the ‘devadasi culture’, where rapists more often than not murder the victim with complete impunity, where marital rape is still not recognized as a crime, where ‘caste killing’ is legitimized as ‘honour killing’. It is a country where most of women’s productive labour of all kinds still goes unacknowledged, unaccounted and unpaid. With economic dependency comes political, social and cultural subordination of women in the country. It is a country where The Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace Act came into effect as late as April 2013. Multiple levels of unseen psychological, physical, symbolic violence normalize and legitimize criminal sexual violations. The careful institutionalized disciplining of women’s actions, roles and bodies, the silencing of the misfits and the victims, the devaluing of women’s view and contributions and the assumption of control over women’s bodies give men a false sense of entitlement.

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In a country where legal systems are also male dominated, further persecute the victim and deny justice, online platforms provide ‘immediate satisfaction’ of venting one’s suppressed rage at being violated, of denting the public image of the perpetrator, though these satisfactions be short lived, ephemeral. In the absence of adequate labour laws relating to sexual harassment at work or outside, women do not have too many choices. It is extremely difficult for victims to ‘prove’ a crime committed in private by powerful men with tremendous influence and privilege that ensure immunity. Mukul Kesavan opines that, ‘If we do not want to relax the standard of proof for crimes, one way of tackling abuse legally would be to make the judicial system more receptive to civil suits where the balance of probability suffices to determine guilt. In the absence of such a system, we are left with public opinion’ (2018). In such a scenario, he argues, calling our predators on a public platform serves the purpose of coming to terms with one’s traumatic past, warning others, allowing people to make up their own mind about the accused, facilitating mobilization and solidarity and most importantly, bringing about a reckoning. Those arguing that it is a travesty of law and order should also consider how inadequate, insufficient and ineffective our laws are to redress such complaints and deliver justice in a time-bound manner. #MeToo has exposed the absolute sense of entitlement with which men engage in predatory behaviours, taking advantage of their dominant patriarchal positioning, in our societies. It has highlighted the pervasive disregard for the idea of consent, the assumption of consent even in non-consent and a surprising tolerance for the same. The pressure to conform, to appease, to perform caring roles, even at the cost of one’s own comfort is engrained into the very psyche of women, making women vulnerable to power imbalances. The discourse on consent and the lack of it are despairingly underdeveloped, the idea much less understood, perpetuating harmful stereotyping around sexual interactions and consent. Women’s sexual behaviour is also mired in a complex repertoire of expectations, involving compliance at all times and contexts, admitting some level of ‘masculine’ coercion as normal and acceptable. Foregrounding the significance of ‘consent’, the movement has promoted the idea of women as agents and not victims. In order to truly appreciate the two movements under discussion, it is important to understand that these campaigns have achieved significant feats but are yet to become revolutions. They should be understood as points of departure, the beginnings of a conversation, a discourse, not as points of arrival, the end and the conclusion. They are neither as insignificant as a moment, nor as eventful as a revolution, just yet. They are somewhere in between the two extremes. The difference between a movement and a revolution is that the latter has the lowest common denominator at its centre. Cyberspace is the most powerful tool to ideologize in the Internet age as also to organize across boundaries of race, class, caste, gender, religion, ethnicity and so on but its potential for the latter is yet unrealized. It is something that powers that cannot be ignored. Election campaigns are designed and won in this space, the powerful need to control it to stay in power and the powerless, to come into power. However, whether online activism can bring about any change in existing power

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relations or not remains to be seen. It would be naive to say they will. It would be pessimistic to say they cannot. It would be reasonable to suggest that they could. The world of cyber activism is not very different from the real world where the emergent, the residual and the dominant, drawing upon Raymond Williams’s formulations to understand the workings of culture, are constantly in a state of conflict. Even though this domain is ultimately controlled by capital and movements, more often than not, either get co-opted into the logic of capitalism or are short lived and thus fail to achieve much, there are crevices from where shoots of resistance can bloom. Even though it is controlled and owned by males, reflects patriarchal value systems and easily succeeds in puncturing the subversive sting and depoliticizing such movements, power circulates in its capillary networks. Each user on this World Wide Web is a potential node of change in that sense. Authoritarian regimes will continue to impose complete to partial Internet bans, the future will be characterized by cyber wars, data and identity thefts, informational warfare but one only needs belief in the possibility of gender equality, a world free of sexual violence to continue to devise strategies to use this emerging domain to bring about progressive change. Change is a slow process. Digital activism works at the level of ideology, grassroots, by generating discourse, encouraging participation and formation of transnational solidarities and that is the way forward. Just like patriarchy reinvents itself to perpetuate new kinds of sexisms, feminism must also constantly recharge, revise, refurbish and recalibrate its weaponry to continue to remain relevant: cyber feminism presents one such opening/possibility/opportunity. The PCC and #MeToo represent pushing for change one small step at a time.

References Al-Sharif, Manal. 2018. The Dangers of Digital Activism The New York Times. https://www.nyt imes.com/2018/09/16/opinion/politics/the-dangers-of-digital-activism.html. Accessed 19 July 2020. Brunner, Elizabeth and Sarah Partlow-Lefevre. 2020. #MeToo as Networked Collective: Examining Consciousness-Raising on Wild Public Networks. Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 17.2: 166–182. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14791420.2020.1750043. Castells, Manuel. 2000. The Rise of the Network Society. Oxford: Blackwell. Dhanaraj, Christina Thomas. 2018. MeToo and Savarna Feminism: Revolutions cannot start with the privileged, feminist future must be equal for all Firstpost.https://www.firstpost.com/ india/metoo-and-savarna-feminism-revolutions-cannot-start-with-the-privileged-feminist-fut ure-must-be-equal-for-all-5534711.html. Accessed 19 July 2020. Fraser, Nancy. 1990. Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy. Social Text 25/26: 56–80. https://www.jstor.org/stable/466240. Joshi, Shareen. 2019. #MeToo in India: What’s Next. Policy Forum 5: 11–15. http://hdl.handle.net/ 10822/1055361. Accessed 19 July 2020. Kesavan, Mukul. 2018. The #MeToo Reckoning. The Telegraph. https://www.telegraphindia.com/ opinion/the-metoo-reckoning/cid/1671772. Accessed 19 July 2020.

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Sardar, Ziauddin. 2000. ALT.CIVILIZATIONS.FAQ: Cyberspace as the darker side of the west. In The Cybercultures Reader, eds. David Bell and Barbara M.Kennedy, 732–52. London: Routledge. Savigny, Heather. 2020. Cultural Sexism: The Politics of Feminist Rage in the #MeToo Era. Bristol, UK: Bristol University Press. Zarkov, Dubravka, and Kathy Davis. 2018. Ambiguities and dilemmas around# MeToo:# ForHow Long and# WhereTo?. European Journal of Women’s Studies 3–9.

Chapter 6

New Media, Identity and Minorities: The Role of Internet in Mainstreaming of Muslims in India Mohammad Reyaz

Abstract India is home to over 172 million Muslims (14.2% of population), but most of them live an abysmally miserable life. For Muslims, questions of survival and security had taken centre-stage after independence. They were either ignored in the larger narrative of the country, at best or worse, stereotyped in the mainstream media and popular imaginations. The economic liberalization has helped a section of Muslims grow on the economic ladder, although much needs to be achieved. This new generation of Muslims considers themselves as active and equal citizens of the country. This has been possible largely due to mediatization in the increasingly wired global world. Internet and social media have provided an alternative “third space” of communication, and have given them voices that they hitherto had difficulties finding in the traditional media. Taking three examples: an online news portal, a Facebook group, and Twitter trends, this chapter analyses how new media is helping Muslims engage with the larger society by giving them an alternative platform to assert their identity. It concludes that Indian Muslims are actively using the internet and new technologies smartly to counter prevailing narrative and breaking stereotypes. Keywords Indian muslim · Minority · New media · Social media · Identity · Third space With 172 million Muslims according to the 2011 census, India is home to the thirdlargest Muslim population in the world (Reyaz 2015). But over 75% of them live an abysmally miserable life on less than a hundred rupees a day. Several governmentappointed committees have expressed their concern on the socio-economic and educational conditions of Muslims in India (Sachar et al. 2006, Kundu et al. 2014). As a marginalized community that is also held responsible for the partition of the country and are otherwise perpetual suspects in the eyes of the majority community, questions of survival and security have remained immediate concerns for them. The new generation of Muslims, however, consider themselves as active and equal citizens of the country. Surely, economic liberalization has helped them grow M. Reyaz (B) Department of Journalism and Mass Communication, Aliah University, Kolkata, India e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 S. Malhotra et al. (eds.), Inhabiting Cyberspace in India, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-9934-7_6

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on the economic ladder, although much needs to be achieved. Educated Muslim youth in India today are more confident than they ever were and they jostle hard to compete in all walks of life, including asserting their rights as equal citizens. This has been possible largely due to mediatization in the increasingly wired global world. Internet, social media, in particular, provides an alternative platform, a sort of “third space” (Echchaibi 2013; Evolvi 2017; Pennington 2018) for communication, and have given them voices that they hitherto had difficulties finding in the traditional media. Indian Muslims today are actively using the internet and new technologies to counter prevailing narratives and breaking stereotypes. This chapter draws upon the writer’s own experience as a former journalist and researcher and analyses how new media is helping Muslims engage with the larger society by giving them an alternative platform to assert their identity. For this purpose, I take three examples: an online news portal, a Facebook group and Twitter trends to show how young, educated Muslims are using these new means of communication to assert not only their identity but also demand equitable rights as equal citizens of the country. But before I proceed, a brief deliberation on the conditions of Muslims in India is in order here.

State of Muslims in India Although Indian Muslims comprise the third-largest Muslim population (only after Indonesia and Pakistan), they are the largest minorities in the country with 14.2% of the population (172 million out of a total 1.2 billion, according to the 2011 Census). Articles 15 and 16 of the Constitution of India prohibit the state from making any discrimination on the grounds of religion, race, caste, sex, descent place of birth, residence or any of them either generally, i.e. every kind of state action in relation to citizens (Article 15) or in matters relating to employment or appointment to any office under the state (Article 16). In reality, however, minorities, particularly Muslims, suffer from systematic discrimination and bias, along with other marginalized communities like Dalits and tribal. Muslims’ representation in the Parliament was never proportional, but it reached the lowest figure of only 22 out of 570 MPs (4.2%) in the sixteenth Lok Sabha that elected Narendra Modi as the prime minister in 2014. In 2019, it has marginally increased to 26 with most of the Muslim MPs from opposition parties, and none from the ruling BJP (Verniers 2019). A high-level committee of the government of India, headed by Justice Rajinder Sachar (retd), to assess the “Social, Economic and Educational Status of Muslims of India” concluded in an exhaustive report that the conditions of Indian Muslims as a whole is worse than Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes—considered the most backward in the social hierarchy of the country—on several parameters. According to this report, “While the overall levels of education in India, measured through various indicators, is still below universally acceptable standards, the educational status of the Muslim community, in particular, is a matter of great concern” (Sachar et al. 2006, p. 84). Their participation in regular salaried jobs is much less than workers from

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other faiths and comprises only 2.5 percent of civil servants. Their share in different state and central level security agencies is a mere four percent. At higher levels, the number goes further down. Despite several government measures, a Post-Sachar Evaluation Committee, headed by Professor Amitabh Kundu of the Jawaharlal Nehru University, observed in its report that although a “start has been made in addressing the development deficit of the Muslim minorities… yet, serious bottlenecks remain” (Kundu et al. 2014, p. 167). Kundu Committee reiterated that Muslims still lag behind even Dalits in terms of access to amenities, and this problem needs to be addressed. Muslim concentrated localities often have poor infrastructure from the road to electricity, from the availability of schools to medical facilities, etc. In urban areas, increasingly they are getting concentrated into pockets or ghettos, with poor infrastructure. The state of Muslims in India has been summed up beautifully in an article in the Time magazine: purged by the British, denigrated by the Hindu right, mistrusted by the majority, marginalized by society. There are nearly as many Muslims in India as in all of Pakistan, but in a nation of more than a billion, they are still a minority, with all the burdens that minorities anywhere carry. Government surveys show that Muslims live shorter, poorer and unhealthier lives than Hindus and are often excluded from the better jobs. To be sure, there are Muslim success stories in the booming economy…But for many Muslims; the inequality of the boom has reinforced their exclusion (Baker 2008).

Economic liberalization that stressed on meritocracy has led the upward socioeducational mobility for a section of Muslims as well, giving rise to the new middle class (Suroor 2014; Khan 2015; Reyaz 2017a). This has given them new confidence that they generally lacked. The new generation of Muslims do not necessarily see themselves as culprits of partition but as the victims of the governments apathy. Educated Muslim youth in India today are more confident than they ever were and regard themselves as active and equal citizens of the country.

New Media as Harbinger of Change? The information revolution is a material outcome of globalization that has led to the expansion of mass media more than ever. This has thrown open both “windows to a wider world and a challenge to traditional ways” (Sinclair 2004). The nature of “interconnectedness” and technological mediation leads to virtual “compression of the world” (ibid). Mediation is the process that bridges the time-space distanciation in communication in the space that Jürgen Habermas called the “public sphere” (2006). Meditation implies “passing through a medium” and the subsequent consequences due to intervention (Tomlinson 1999). It is thus redefining what is private and what is public, where the realities of the “television community” testify to mediate nonreciprocal relationships (ibid). There is an overall consensus on the role of mass media in not just globalizing trends but in the shaping of our identities. To stress on the critical role of “national print-languages” in the nation-building process as an

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“imagined community,” Benedict Anderson called it “print capitalism” (2006). Globalization and the flow of information promoted a “network society,” helping bring like-minded communities and people together. According to Jan van Dijk, a network society is a “social formation with an infrastructure of social and media networks enabling its prime mode of organization at all levels (individual, group/organizational and societal)” (2006). In the last few decades, the internet has added the cybernetic dimension to the existing public sphere, leading to further democratization. Social media is increasingly blamed for spreading fake news, for being used as a tool of propaganda and hatred spread against communities (Farooq 2018). But before it took this ugly turn, it emerged as an important platform for the “network society” to voice their common concerns, debate and deliberate, and in certain cases use them for the larger mobilization. We saw this during the Occupy Wall Street protests in 2011, during the 2010–11 Arab Springs, the anti-corruption movement in India in 2010, and so on. While it is increasingly being used for negative propaganda and spreading hatred, it is simultaneously being used for promoting camaraderie, and often give voiceless communities voices, and a platform for raising and rather echoing their concerns, and for promoting their side of stories. This is not the first time that the latest forms of social media have affected a sea change. “Five centuries before Facebook and the Arab spring, social media helped bring about the Reformation…when Martin Luther and his allies took the new media of their day—pamphlets, ballads and woodcuts—and circulated them through social networks to promote their message of religious reform” (The Economist 2011). New media has similarly contributed in a “democratic and emancipatory manner” as well and revived the notion of “planetary citizenship” through “internet activism” by being informed, informing others and constructing “virtual” socio-political relations (Kahn and Kellner 2004). The new media has added a new dimension to the existing public sphere, in terms of its availability and reach; and has emerged as a potent platform for voicing the concerns of those on the margin. The internet is thus attributed to having created a system of “networked public,” who do not just consume information, but there is a “thrilling and unprecedented sense of participation” as well (The Economist 2011). Virtual social networks have thus enabled people to express their preferences en masse, creating “momentum for further action” (ibid.). The Internet has blurred the boundary between real and virtual. Post-Modernist theorist Jean Baudrillard wrote, “Illusion is no longer possible, because the real is no longer possible” (2006). The world of the internet consequently is, borrowing from Baudrillard, “hyperreal”. Post-colonial experiences of human beings, particularly after new waves of globalization, have been explained in terms of “hybridity” by post-modernists; which implies reinforcement or complimenting localism (Werbner and Modood 2015). However, the inherent asymmetry of globalization and information-revolution raises questions on post-modern binaries of hybridity. New media is not a utopian platform either and has its shortcomings besides still being very lopsided in favour of the majoritarian narratives. Cyberspace may also be manipulative or used as a propaganda machine by government or parties of varying colour (Kahn and Kellner 2005). But because of its very nature, the internet provides an equitable space to

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the minority voices as well, even if not at equal footing. That is, to borrow from the Russian linguist Mikhail Bakhtin, there is dialogism between centripetal and centrifugal forces acting against each other in cultural formations that better explain this asymmetrical communicative process in the information age (Doraiswamy 2009).

Scope for an Alternative Media As a minority community, Muslims in India are either ignored in the larger narrative of the country or worse, stereotyped in mainstream media (Kanungo 2002; Brass 2004; Farouqui 2009). The mainstream media is often accused of not representing enough of the alternate voices and propagating a set agenda. Those on the periphery, opposition or in minority have complained about lack of space and time in the conscience of the mainstream media. In an economy where market forces determine what makes news and comes to the front page or prime time, there is an increasingly felt need for alternative media—a kind of advocacy journalism. Alternative “mediascape”—to borrow the term from Arjun Appadurai (2006)—always existed, whether it was Shiv Sena’s mouthpiece Samna, People’s Democracy of CPI (M) or Milli Gazette and Jamaat-e-Islami’s mouthpiece The Radiance for Muslims. Such alternative media manoeuvred to find a place for itself but its reach was always marred with limitation of resources and logistics. The information revolution—the rise of the internet—has given the minorities a kind of elixir by adding a new dimension to the public sphere. As the socio-economic mobility gave considerable leverage to the new generation of Muslims in India, they are attempting to influence the narrative to their advantage with the help of new technologies of communications. To elaborate on this argument, I have taken three examples: an alternative news portal focusing on news from the marginalized communities, a Facebook group, and some of the top Twitter trends of recent years.

TwoCircles.Net as an Alternative News Portal TwoCircles.net (TCN) is an alternative news portal, launched in 2006 by an Indian expatriate Kashif-ul-Huda, based in Boston, with a few staff scattered in different Indian cities by 2010. Among community portals, TCN scored where several others failed, as it is focused on news reportage, as opposed to most such sites which act as news-aggregator or at a poor copy-desk job. Journalists working with them stressed that they have the “freedom to do stories they passionately want to work on rather than working on routine assignments,” and were allowed to report on “what was ignored or misreported by mainstream media” (Personal interviews with reporters of

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TCN).1 Its need was felt in the wake of rising Islamophobia and stereotypical representation of the marginalized communities, particularly Muslims. Kashif-ul-Huda, the founding Editor of TCN notes: “The mainstream media does not devote the time and space needed to show the complete picture. Usually, Muslims and other marginalized communities tend to hit the headlines in negative contexts—terrorism, fatwa, backwardness” (Polanki 2010). He adds in another personal interview, “Our agenda is to get Indian Muslim stories and viewpoints out there because mainstream media is filtering Muslim stories and views” (2012). They claim to approach Muslims “not as religious, but as socio-economic group”, and cover the socio-economic conditions of Muslims, unlike Urdu papers that are “busy flattering leaders of the community” (Akbar 2011). Referring to TCN readership The Indian Express wrote in 2011: Certainly, the site is “read by politicians, policy planners, journalists of major newspapers and television channels, and, rumour has it, investigators too” (ibid.). It appears to have developed its expertise on “wrongs” committed to the community, perhaps because their reporters and stringers live within the community and feel the anguish they go through. Another reason where TCN scored over community-based Urdu newspapers or English journals like Milli Gazette (that is also available online), is that their main target readers were, as a former correspondent told this writer in 2012, “computer literate Muslims” besides the policymakers. They did series on socio-economic conditions of Muslims in the country who are very diverse and hence have their own issues and challenges. They questioned the community leaders and assessed the performance of elected representatives. At a time when the witch-hunt of young Muslims began in the name of counter-terrorism operations, they consistently reported speaking to their family members, and diligently followed cases. But they also highlighted the positive aspects of the community and offered role models. TCN was a community funded initiative whose success inspired, led to the mushrooming of many such news portals, including BeyondHeadlines, Muslim Mirror, India Tomorrow, Caravan Daily (now renamed as Clarion India), etc. often started by former employees or contributors of TCN. Although started as a community portal focusing on Indian Muslims, TCN has since evolved into a site claiming to be “mainstream media of the marginalized”, and tries to cover issues related to Dalits, tribals and other marginalized communities.TCN team wants to take the credit for “teaching the mainstream media to cover Muslim issues,” as the TCN Editor Huda once told me. But for the last couple of years, it seems to have drifted and stagnated, while several mainstream prints and online news media have increasingly begun to cover issues of Muslims more seriously.

1 Interviews

with current and former reporters and editors of TwoCircles.net were conducted in March-April 2012.

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Muslim Youths’ Forum Against Communalism, Terrorism, and Sedition In the aftermath of the 2012 Bodo riots in Assam, young Muslim professionals of the state from varied backgrounds came together under the banner of Muslim Youths’ Forum Against Communalism, Terrorism and Sedition (MY-FACTS). What began initially as a close Facebook group has today become a platform of like-minded youth from the state to not only debate and engage on issues of importance but work in collaboration to help improve the conditions of one of the most marginalized communities of the state. The group with nearly two thousand and five hundred members has been at the forefront whether it was helping rehabilitate the riot victims or help members of the marginalized community get access to justice and other necessities. It is comprised of lawyers who fight their cases, social activists who campaign for their rights and mobilize resources, doctors who help set up health camps, and writers and academicians who write articles and research papers on their plight. What makes the group unique is its assertion and concerted effort to work for the betterment of one of the most marginalized communities in the state that has the second-highest proportion of the Muslim population (34%). In April 2016, they organically launched a new genre of a poetic assertion that was later termed as Miya poetry as a “symbol of empowerment for Muslims in Assam” (Das 2016). The Bengali-origin Muslims of Assam are writing poetry to confront stereotypes and prejudices. Hafiz Ahmed, a teacher by profession, author and poet and President of a literary society, penned down a heart-wrenching poem, titled “I am Miya” and shared it on his Facebook on April 27, detailing the appalling conditions of Bengali-origin Muslims of Assam, often derogatorily referred to as Miya and are employed into odd manual jobs. Here is one stanza from the poem: Write Down I am a Miya, A citizen of a democratic, secular, Republic Without any right, My mother has been made a D voter, Though her parents are Indian, If you wish you can kill me, drive me away from my village, Snatch away my green field, The Roller of you Can roll over me, Your bullets Can shatter my breast, Without any punishment (Reyaz 2016).

This poem became an instant hit within hours on Facebook; and was liked, shared, copied and commented upon by hundreds of people, mostly Assamese Muslims of Bengal origin. This was not the end though as more pleasant surprises were waiting. The poetry, with which almost every Bengali-origin Muslims of Assam could identify, invoked different feelings among young educated Assamese Muslims. A few days later, Shalim M Hussain, a research scholar at the English Department of Jamia Millia Islamia, penned down a response to Ahmed’s poem and shared it on social media. Ahmed was a middle-aged man while Hussain was about 30 years old in 2016. Hussain’s response seemed perfect and emphatic progress on Ahmed’s feelings. He addresses Ahmed as Nana or maternal grandfather and acknowledges that yes government documents are finally accepting that he is indeed a “Miya,” but is more confident, proud of his identity; and is optimistic about his present and future as he hopes to get a visa and ride on bullet train:

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M. Reyaz Nana I have written attested countersigned, And been verified by a public notary, That I am a Miya …… See me hold by my side the Constitution, Point a finger to Delhi, Walk to my Parliament my Supreme Court my Connaught Place, And tell the MPs, the esteemed judges, and the lady selling Trinkets and her charm on Janpath, Well I am Miya. …. See me catch a plane get a Visa catch a bullet train, Catch a bullet, Catch your drift, Catch a rocket, Wear a lungi to space, And there where no one can hear you scream, Thunder I am Miya (Reyaz 2016).

The poetic-debate has since continued as several other students, activists, and people from different walks of life have attempted to express their feelings through verses. It gradually even caught the attention of some national and international media, and in 2019 also generated controversy in the wake of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) (Choudhury 2019). What is important to note is that many people who became active in MY-FACTS group gradually may have parted ways or some even got disillusioned, but still many of those members including Advocate AmanWadud, as well as a researcher and grassroots worker Abdul Kalam Azad, besides Ahmed and Hussain mentioned above, and several others emerged as important voices of the community even for the mainstream media. They often contribute to media and academic debates by writing articles and research papers (and some are even writing books), making documentary films, participating in TV discussions, etc. documenting discriminations, but also telling their stories of challenges and hopes.

Twitter Trends In recent years, Twitter has become an important platform for public engagements. On 11 March 2020, Zee News ran a prime time show on a purported jihad of 13 kinds, including “soft” and “hard” jihad. The very Islamophobic content of the entire show by the prime time anchor Sudhir Chaudhary based on old propaganda of the Hindu right-wing got hilarious responses from young Muslims who added several other types of jihads to the list—husn jihad, chai jihad, egg jihad, etc. Started by Mumbai based writer and social media influencer Saniya Sayed, with over 35 thousand followers, #HusnJihad was top Twitter trend nationally by 12 March 2020 where people mocked Chaudhary and posted beautiful pictures of themselves. Some shared the photograph of Chaudhary’s recent trip to Dubai, calling it ‘Dubai Jihad’, while still others shared photographs of PM Narendra Modi with Arab leaders calling it ‘PetroJihad’. An article in The Print later noted, “Muslims pushed back with intelligent, funny and smart comebacks. What emerged was a confident community willing to engage but not ready to be used as communal fodder…(T)he trend was led by Muslim women, whose freedom and agency within the community has recently been questioned a lot” (Khan 2020). Similarly in October 2019, when the Hindu right-wing spread malicious contents against the Prophet Muhammad, Muslims reacted with the

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hash-tag #ProphetOfCompassion, highlighting positive aspects of Islam and the last Prophet. A Twitter thread by young activist Umar Khalid on Prophet Muhammad’s life, and tales of compassions was retweeted over 2500 times and liked by over 9 thousand people. One of the tweets in the thread read: “We all, irrespective of our faith, need to learn from the Prophet life and teachings. Prophet is not just for Muslims, but for all. He is not just RahmatulMuslimeen. He is RahmatulAlameen. A rahmat for the entire alam, the entire world! #ProphetOfCompassion” (Twitter Thread 20 October 2020). This tweet itself was liked by over two thousand Twitter users and shared by over five hundred of them.

Conclusion I have earlier argued in the context of West Bengal that “a new generation of emerging middle-class Muslims, emboldened by whatever little wealth they amassed in last few decades, coupled with current populist political patronage, have increasingly become assertive and confident about their rights as equitable citizens” (Reyaz 2017a). To varying degrees, this sense of assertion is true for Muslims across India, much to the discomfort of non-Muslims as well as traditional Muslim elites (Reyaz 2017b, 2018). It is interesting to note that while they embrace the religious identity, they are equally assertive about their identity as a citizen of India. That is, they are equally— and simultaneously—comfortable in both these identity markers, and are not willing to forgo anyone for the other. This was evident during the December 2019 anti-CAANPR-NRC2 protests at Jamia Millia Islamia and Shaheen Bagh in New Delhi, and in other parts of the country (Siddiqui 2020). This new generation of Muslims, who are assertive than they ever were, found the mainstream media as very prejudiced and acknowledged the importance of speaking for themselves. They found a strategic tool in new-social media, an alternative platform, to exploit to their advantage, as they still have little representation in the traditional media. They critique the mainstream media, the majoritarian narratives, and simultaneously present their alternate countviews. In the process, they have also been successful in influencing the mainstream narratives as many of these educated Muslims have eventually joined the media industry or contribute regular articles to them. Often their reportage and perspectives are fresh and different from the mainstream narratives.

2 In

December 2019, the Indian Government passed the Citizenship Amendment Act 2019 (CAA) that would allow refugees of all faiths from Bangladesh, Pakistan and India to take Indian citizenships except Muslims. This came in the aftermath of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam and talks of expanding a similar process all over India through the National Population Register (NPR). This sparked countrywide protests, mostly by Muslims as they felt that the cocktail of CAANPR-NRC will be used against them to disfranchise them and further marginalize the by taking away their citizenship that began from Jamia Millia Islamia and Shaheen Bagh in New Delhi.

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An earlier version of this chapter was presented in the seminar at Jamia on “the Cyber-ian turn in culture” in 2012.3 Since then, there have been similar researches in other countries as well. Giulia Evolvi (2017) wrote on the “hybrid Muslim identities in digital space” by analyzing an Italian blog Yalla Italia as representing “a ‘third space’ where young Italian Muslims contrast dominant media stereotypes, thereby creating ‘disruptive flows’.” Rosemary Pennington (2018) similarly analyzed the scope of the “social media as third spaces” by “exploring Muslim identity and connection in Tumblr” to understand how it “can facilitate third spaces where these bloggers can explore the hybrid nature of their identities while connecting to others who share that experience.” Nabil Echchaibi, on the other hand, analyzed the Muslimah Media Watch as a representation of “an increasingly important activist enterprise by an emerging generation of young Muslim women who assert their public visibility and engage in a critical interpretation and performance of their religious identities” (2013). As noted earlier, post-colonial and post-modern identities are fluid and considering the asymmetry in power relations that Muslims in India face, Bakhtin’s dialogism would better explain it than hybridity. But Indian Muslims are definitely no more willing to either accept rampant Islamophobia in the mainstream narratives, or the largely prejudiced stereotypes about them. They have realized that they cannot let others speak on their behalf any longer, and are hence coming forward, using all possible means to tell their side of stories. New-social media has given them an alternative community platform, a “third space” for introspection, debate and deliberation, and a channel through which they are engaging with the larger society.

References Akbar, Irena. 2011, March 12. The good word. The Indian Express. http://archive.indianexpress. com/news/the-good-word/760752/0. Accessed 20 March 2020. Anderson, Benedict. 2006. Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. London: Verso. Appadurai, Arjun. 2006. Disjuncture and difference in the global cultural economy. In Media and cultural studies: Keywords, eds.Meenakshi Gigi Durham and Douglas M. Kellner, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Baker, Aryn. 2008. India’s Muslims in crisisThe Time. http://content.time.com/time/world/article/ 0,8599,1862650-1,00.html. Accessed 20 March 2020. Baudrillard, Jean. 2006. The procession of simulacra. In Media and cultural studies: Keywords, eds. Meenakshi Gigi Durham and Douglas M. Kellner. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Brass, Paul. 2004. Riots, pogroms, and genocide in contemporary India: From partition to the present. PaulBrass.com. http://www.paulbrass.com/riots__pogroms__and_genocide_in_contem porary_india__from_partition_to_the_present_32432.htm. Accessed 20 March 2020.

3 A revised version was later also presented in 2016 at the MUSA workshop at Cambridge University

with the title "Technology, media, and minority: The role of internet in mainstreaming of Muslims in India".

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Choudhury, Snigdha. 2019, July 16. Miya poetry: Why is it creating noise in Assam now. India Today. https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/miya-poetry-why-is-it-creating-noisein-assam-now-explained-nrc-citizenship-bill-1570048-2019-07-16. Accessed 20 March 2020. Das, Nabina. 2016, September 18. For better or verse: Miyah poetry is now a symbol of empowerment for Muslims in Assam. FirstPost. https://www.firstpost.com/living/for-better-orverse-miyah-poetry-is-now-a-symbol-of-empowerment-for-muslims-in-assam-3007746.html. Accessed 20 March 2020. Doraiswamy, Rashmi. 2009. Globalisation, the third world and culture. In Globalization and the third world: Issues, prospects, and challenges, ed. Abdulrahim P. Vijapur and Rashmi Doraiswamy, 244–245. New Delhi: Manak Publications. Echchaib, Nabil. 2013. Muslimah Media Watch: Media activism and Muslim choreographies of social change. Journalism 14(7): 852–867. https://doi.org/10.1177/1464884913478360. Evolvi, Giulia. 2017. Muslim identities in digital space: The Italian blog Yalla. Social Compass 64 (2): 220–232. https://doi.org/10.1177/0037768617697911. Farooq, Gowhar. 2018. Politics of fake news: How WhatsApp became a potent propaganda tool in India. Media Watch 9(1): 106–117. https://doi.org/10.15655/mw/2018/v9i1/49279. Farouqui, Ather. 2009. Muslims and media images: News versus views. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Habermas, Jürgen. 2006. The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article. In Media and cultural studies: Keywords, eds. Meenakshi Gigi Durham and Douglas M. Kellner. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Harichandan, Deepak. 2020, March 26. Cartoonscape. The Hindu. https://www.thehindu.com/opi nion/cartoon/cartoonscape-march-26-2020/article31167023.ece. Accessed 26 March 2020. Kahn, Richard, and Douglas Kellner. 2004. New media and internet activism: From the ‘battle of Seattle’ to blogging. New Media and Society 6(1): 87-95 https://doi.org/10.1177/146144480403 9908. Kahn, Richard, and Douglas Kellner. 2005. Oppositional politics and the internet: A critical/ reconstructive approach. Cultural Politics 1 (1): 75–100. https://doi.org/10.2752/174321905778 054926. Kanungo, Pralay. 2002. RSS’s tryst with politics: From Hedgewar to Sudarshan. Delhi: Manohar. Khalid, Umar. 2019. Thread on personal Twitter handle @UmarKhalidJNU.https://twitter.com/ UmarKhalidJNU/status/1185816080163328000?s=20. Accessed 20 March 2020. Khan, Saif Ullah. 2020, March 13. Sudhir Chaudhary’s jihad rant on Zee News just got hit with eggs, petrol and some beauty. The Print. https://theprint.in/opinion/pov/sudhir-chaudharys-jihad-ranton-zee-news-just-got-hit-with-eggs-petrol-and-some-beauty/380349/. Accessed 20 March 2020. Khan, Tabassum Ruhi. 2015. Beyond hybridity and fundamentalism: Emerging Muslim identity in globalized India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Polanki, Pallavi. 2010, December 15. Do not let others define you. Open Magazine. http://www.ope nthemagazine.com/article/international/do-not-let-others-define-you. Accessed 20 March 2020. Accessed 20 March 2020. Pennington, Rosemary. 2018. Social media as third spaces? Exploring Muslim identity and connection in Tumblr. International Communication Gazette 80 (7): 620–636. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 1748048518802208. Reyaz, M. 2015, August 27. Census of religion: Government sold it, media bought it. DailyO. https://www.dailyo.in/politics/census-2011-hindus-muslims-media-religion-bihar-ass embly-polls-2015-population-newspapers/story/1/5917.html. Accessed 20 March 2020. Reyaz, M. 2017a, July 15. New found Muslim Assertiveness in Bengal and the Rise of Hindutva. Cafe Dissensus. https://cafedissensus.com/2017/07/15/new-found-muslim-assertiveness-in-ben gal-and-the-rise-of-hindutva/. Accessed 20 March 2020. Reyaz, M. 2017b, June 3. An Indian Muslim on why Naseeruddin Shah’spiece filled him with rage. DailyO. https://www.dailyo.in/voices/naseeruddin-shah-ht-article-indian-muslims-lynchi ngs/story/1/17597.html. Accessed 20 March 2020.

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Reyaz, M. 2018, April 26. Blood of Muslims on its hands? Salman Khurshid and the problem of sarkari Musalman. DailyO. https://www.dailyo.in/politics/salman-khurshid-congresshas-blood-on-its-hands-congress-minority-appeasement-hashimpura-babri-demolition/story/1/ 23719.html. Accessed 20 March 2020. Siddiqui, Furquan Ameen. 2020, January 3. State of siege. The Baffler. https://thebaffler.com/log ical-revolts/state-of-siege-siddiqui. Accessed 20 March 2020. Sinclair, John. 2004. Globalisation, supranational institutions and media. In The Sage Handbook of Media Studies, eds. John D.H. Downing with Denis McQuail, Philip Schlesinger and Ellen Wartella, 65 -82. New Delhi: Sage Publications. Kundu, A., Alam M., Inamdar, P.A., Khan, A.U., Mohanan, P.C., Naqvi F., Shaban A., Unni J., Khan AA. 2014. Post-Sachar evaluation committee report, Ministry of Minority Affairs, New Delhi, Government of India. https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9LZb7YlBSHbME1HS05sRWx RNkE/view. Accessed 20 March 2020. Sachar, R., Hamid, S., Oommen, T. K., Basith, M. A., Basant, R., Majeed, A., & Shariff, A. 2006. Social, economic and educational status of the Muslim community of India (No. 22136). Prime Minister’s High-Level Committee, Cabinet Secretariat, Government of India http://www. minorityaffairs.gov.in/sites/default/files/sachar_comm.pdf. Accessed 20 March 2020. Suroor, Hasan. 2014. India’s Muslim spring: Why is nobody talking about It?. New Delhi: Rupa Publications. The Economist. 2011, December 17. Social media in the 16th century: How Luther went viral. https://www.economist.com/node/21541719. Accessed 20 March 2020. Tomlinson, John. 1999. Globalisation and culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Dijk, Van. 2006. The network society: Social aspects of new media. London: Sage Publications. Verniers, Gilles. 2019, May 30. Muslims’ under-representation in Parliament is not a consequence of the BJP’s rise. Hindustan Times. https://www.hindustantimes.com/analysis/muslims-underrepresentation-in-parliament-is-not-a-consequence-of-the-bjp-s-rise/story-RAhku0p15Ru3d4A 3hX1sAN.html. Accessed 20 March 2020. Werbner, Pnina, and Tariq Modood. 2015. Debating cultural hybridity: Multicultural identities and the politics of anti-racism. London: Zed Books. Zee News. 2020. DNA with Sudhir Chaudhary. 11 March 2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=8TPClp-j7ZU. Accessed 20 March 2020. Reyaz, M. 2016, May 1. Assam’s Bengal origin Muslims choose poetry to confront stereotypes and prejudices. TwoCircles.net. http://web.archive.org/web/20161218115513/http://twocircles. net/2016may01/1462092489.html . Accessed 26 March 2020.

Part III

Cyber-Aesthetics and Narratives of Leisure

Chapter 7

Cyberspace and the Aesthetics of Contemporary Perception Sunil Kumar

Abstract All cultures constitute heterotopias, counter-sites, in which the all the other sites that can be found in that particular culture are simultaneously represented, contested and inverted. The function of the heterotopia is to serve as a space of illusion that would expose the world of a particular culture either as even more illusory or to compensate for and perhaps gloss over its shortcomings. How is one to assess cyberspace within this paradigm? The essay places cyberspace within this Foucauldian framework and further explores the need for the creation of an artificial topology through the use of words such as wallpapers, carbon footprints, chatrooms etc. It draws heavily on Paul Virilio’s theorization of technology and dromology to emphasize the creation of a concomitant “aesthetics of disappearance” that is being brought about in contemporary perception. Keywords Cyberspace · Aesthetics Let us begin with Plato, the infamous Book Ten of the Republic, where Socrates wonders what one would call a craftsman “who can make all the objects produced by other particular crafts…this same craftsman can not only make all artificial objects, but also create all plants and animals, himself included, and, in addition, earth and sky and gods, the heavenly bodies and everything in the underworld” (Plato 1987). To Glaucon’s bewildered remark that such a craftsman would no doubt be a wonderfully clever man, with an astonishing amount of skill, Plato replies that Glaucon himself can create all these things, “take a mirror and turn it round in all directions; before long you will create sun and stars and earth, yourself and all other animals and plants, and furniture and the other objects we mentioned just now” (Plato 1987). We all know that Glaucon is not convinced by this, but he is enriched by the dialogue, as is the reader on the doctrine of Ideas. But this world of ideas or forms is forever beyond Glaucon’s reach. Mearleau-Ponty once said, “Everything I see is in principle within reach of my sight, marked on the map of the I can” (MarleauPonty 1964). What is shown to the viewer through the reflection in the mirror is S. Kumar (B) Department of English, Royal Thimphu College, Ngabiphu, Bhutan e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 S. Malhotra et al. (eds.), Inhabiting Cyberspace in India, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-9934-7_7

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the appearance of the object still out of reach, but she/he has the illusion of having brought it closer. Art is one such kind of representation that presents to the audience the illusion of immediacy, and it is “not ‘what is’, but something which resembles ‘what is’ without being it. The actual “it” the thing in itself that the painter does not have access to is beyond his grasp, and it is the ideal, the universal concept hypostatised as truth, the One. If it is forever outside the map of the “I can”, neither the artist, nor the viewer have access to it. It is safely relegated by Plato to the “backworld” of the metaphysical. Plato’s concern is the illusion of immediacy that art has attached to it. The problem lies not in the artist really, but in the effect of this illusion on the audience, “such representations definitely harm the minds of their audiences, unless they are inoculated against them by knowing their real nature” (Plato 1987). Now it is simple enough to know to some extent the real nature of a reflection in a mirror, and there is a point at which the image would change when the mirror is moved. The problem arises when the mirror is moved and the reflection stays still. It does not obey the command of the mover. That is when the real nature of things becomes disorienting and the nature of the real itself undergoes a sea change. The real nature of things sits comfortably juxtaposed with the virtual or the cyber nature of things. Now after two and a half centuries, even before the debate that the idealists and the empiricists began had reached any satisfactory middle ground, there is the real nature of the virtual to consider and to be inoculated against. How does one gain insight into virtual mimesis? What is its aesthetic? What is its reciprocal relation with vision? Let us keep with the mirror. Foucault refers to it as a utopia, a placeless place. “In the mirror, I see myself where I am not, in an unreal, virtual space that opens up behind the surface; I am over there, there where I am not, a sort of shadow that gives my own visibility to myself, that enables me to see myself where I am absent: such is the utopia of the mirror” (Foucault 1984). But the mirror is also a heterotopia as it does exist in actuality. Heterotopias are counter-sites, “a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted” (Foucault 1984). These heterotopias are then linked by Foucault to slices in time, and they are also heterochronies. Citing the cemetery as an example, he states that “The heterotopia begins to function at full capacity when men arrive at a sort of absolute break with their traditional time” (Foucault 1984). It is at the counter-site of the cemetery that the individual comes up against the counter-time of his or her eventual non-being. There are other heterotopias of indefinitely accumulating time, such as museums and libraries as well as heterotopias oriented not towards eternal time, but towards time in its most transitory aspect, such as fairgrounds and vacation villages. Another characteristic of the heterotopia useful in our interrogation of the virtual is that it always presupposes a system of opening and closing that both isolates it and makes it penetrable. It is not freely accessible like a public space. “Either the entry is compulsory, as in the case of entering a barracks or prison, or else the individual has to submit to rites and purification” (Foucault 1984). When these characteristics that Foucault attributes to heterotopias are kept in mind, the question inevitably surfaces whether cyberspace can be seen as heterotopological

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in keeping with mirrors, cemeteries, fairgrounds and prisons. Cyberspace to a certain extent does fulfil all the parameters of heterotopology, and it too contains within it the potential to represent, contest and invert real sites of culture. Most importantly, it is “capable of juxtaposing in a single real space several sites that are themselves incompatible” (1984). The shift to cyberspace can be seen as the shift from the rectangle of the stage to the rectangle of the screen. The function of the heterotopia is to either serve as a space of illusion that would expose our real world as still more illusory, or it is to compensate for the flaws of our world. So how is one to assess cyberspace then within this paradigm? Is it a heterotopia of illusion or of compensation? Or of both? What is the function of cyberspace in relation to the space that remains? Do the chat rooms and virtual avatars serve as simulacra to reveal to us the illusory and constructed nature of our stable individual selves and identities? Does the “freedom” to “be” all that you can be in these simulated towns and cities represent the freedom of our lives? Does it contest the lack of freedom in our administered lives or does it compensate for the lack of freedom, and serve therefore as a cyberanodyne? Perhaps it is possible to look at cyberspace as a heterotopia of an illusion of compensation, in other words one, that reveals the fact even the compensation at offer in contemporary culture is but the illusion of a compensation. Before we delve into the question of the nature of cyberspace and the possibility of banishing the artists there, let us take a closer look at the real nature of this digital/virtual space. And it goes without saying that before we can address the space of the cyber kind, we need, to whatever little extent possible, within the space of this, paper toy with the idea of space itself. For this, we will take a detour to another “backworldsman” (hinterwelter), who in 1781 dissuaded people from expositing on such phenomenon as time and space. He did not use the word metaphysical for them, but instead labelled these concepts as transcendental. In other words, he stated that it is impossible to arrive at any understanding of these concepts because they are the very building blocks with which we structure our consciousness. Something akin to Wittgenstein’s statement about the impossibility of the eye being the object of its own vision. Space for Kant is not an empirical concept derived from outer experiences. He states that it “is a necessary a priori representation which underlies all our intuitions. It is impossible to have a representation of there being no space, though one can very well think of space without objects to fill it” (Kant 2007). In other words, it is in itself pure intuition. Along with time, space is not an empirical concept, it cannot be experienced, but it is instead the building block of experience. It is not an attribute of things-in-themselves but the very form of cognition, a constitutive condition that makes intuition possible. Adorno, in a series of lectures delivered in 1959 on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, states that there is no such thing as a pure intuition of time and space. “If you have nothing better to do, or if you find yourselves unable to sleep at night in the first night of the vacation…you could spend some time experimenting with the attempt to imagine pure time or pure space without any specific empirical contents. You will then make the remarkable discovery that you cannot conceive of such an absolute

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space without some empirical substratum or without imagining some feature that identifies some space as space”(2007). So if it is difficult enough to conceive of space, then where does that leave us in regard to cyberspace? What is its “empirical substratum”? A fundamental event that occurred between the hundred and seventy-eight years separating Kant and Adorno was the publication in 1915 of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. The idea of space as Adorno states always contains a relation to a referent. In the words of Einstein, “Every description of events in space involves the use of a rigid body to which such events have to be referred” (Einstein 1920). Einstein discourages because of its vagueness the use of the word “space” and instead suggests its being replaced by “motion relative to a practically rigid body of reference” and further replaces “body of reference” with “system of co-ordinates”. What is meant by “motion” is the alteration of a body with time. Space then one finds out is not just empty form as Kant had proposed. It is not just an a priori concept that would serve as a given to help structure our representations. If it is to be measured in terms of speed, then space is relation between referents. Even Berkeley, in opposition to Descartes, stated that one cannot see distance and that it was something that was suggested to us by the imagination. Distance, thus, is as forwarded by the relativity theory as a speculative construct that gives us access to a function of time, as Robert Nivrre states. In order to be conceptualised space needs a referent, a rigid body, from which it will be measured. It could also be thought of as distance to be traversed and its function according to Nivrre, is to order things spatially, to make things visible and to provide accessible zones to the body (Nivvre n.d.).

Now cyberspace fulfils none of these functions. It has no body of reference or system of coordinates that alter with time. It provides no accessible zones to the body. The only function of time it gives us access to is information in the form/speed of light. It gives access to information and not sensation, and it is due to this that the question of aesthesis, as a science of feeling becomes complicated. How does one feel or be moved by information in the form of pure, indirect light? What Walter Benjamin once said in regard to photography in 1934 could be said to hold true here as well, when he said that, “Transforming everything abject about poverty, it’s transformed it also into an object of pleasure” (Benjamin 2008). In an essay published in 1786 “What is Orientation in Thinking?”, Kant elaborates three meanings of the concept of orientation. The first pertains to orientation in physical space, as in finding our way in a familiar darkroom by being told the location of one particular object. The second refers to extending this geographical orientation mathematically, and thereby steering our way through that particular darkroom and finally, he speaks of a third, logical orientation, which does not pertain to experience with a sensuous basis that would help locate ones’ self spatially, but refers instead to placing ones judgement or cognition within the universal system of reason. It is obvious that the cybernaut cannot orient him or herself physically or mathematically. The backworld of the screen is almost as inaccessible as the metaphysical

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or the transcendental world and technology here, as Heidegger put it, truly accomplishes metaphysics. The surfer could perhaps place his or her judgement or cognition within some “programming system” if she/he was well versed with the transmission apparatus and perhaps also with the economics of spectrum allocation but there is no sensuous basis whatsoever to help orient the surfer, and it is for this reason that the aesthetics of his or her perception has to be rethought. The question that begs to be asked is why the illusion of topology, the illusion for the first time in the history of technology of being inside this electromagnetic sphere. This was not done with television technology. Why then the need to create an artificial topology, of websites, wallpapers, carbon footprints, domain names, chatrooms, simcities? Nivver describes this as a tendency of “retrofitting systems destabilized by the removal of spatiality with mechanisms that reconstitute its structural effects” (Nivvre n.d.). One of the fundamental characteristics of heterotopology according to Foucault is its all pervasiveness, “there is probably not a single culture in the world that fails to constitute heterotopias. That is a constant of every human group” (Foucault 1984). The revolutionary characteristic of our age, which has seen the transmission revolution after the transport revolution of the previous one, is, in the words of Paul Virilio, that “real space…has already been discredited to the sole advantage of the real time instantaneous exchanges” (Virilio 1994). With the advent of globalisation— the next level of imperialism—with the neo-liberal removal of barriers for the sake of economic restructuring, one enters an age where presence must bow out before telepresence—money has to make room for electronic money which can be circulated globally at a dizzying velocity. The drag of the transport revolution has to be conquered. The function of cyberspace is to facilitate this. One must not lose sight of the fact that the Internet network was originally designed to link up the firms of the American military-industrial complex. So what we have here, what we are left with, is the hypothesis of cyberspace as the construction of an electromagnetic heterotopia in the era of globalisation. It has its precise determined function of facilitating the flow of trade and surveillance. It posits itself as neutral concept but within it can be juxtaposed the contrary purposes of the flow of trade, the flow of real-time images for war, the flow of information, on-line universities, pornography, piracy, tourism, etc. This, as mentioned above, is a central principle of heterotopology that it be “capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible” (Foucault 1984). Now if Plato wanted to banish the artist, because of the harm that the artist could bring to the mind of the audience, how does the audience inoculate its mind in this electromagnetic heterotopia we call cyberspace? If the metaphysics of presence as a discourse reduced and reified the presencing (from wesen—to endure as presence, to dwell/tarry) of beings how does one contend with the metaphysics of telepresence? It is said that the ageing Virginia Oldoini, Countess of Castiglione veiled the mirrors in her house to hide from herself her progressing decrepitude. In contrast to this, we have the singer Amanda Lear who replaced the mirrors of her house with an integrated video circuit, “and so the light of her image follows after her like the

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most intimate of companions (like her shadow you could say) (Virilio 2009). Unlike Castiglione, she would not have to fear seeing her reflection, she could merely stop filming herself when she chooses, and she would to her naive self-emerge as Plato’s wonderfully clever craftsman recreating not the world but her own youth this time. This virtual reflection of herself would have nothing to do with her spatio-temporal being. This reflection of hers would have nothing to do with the geometric or passive optics of the space of matter which can only cover man’s immediate proximity. This reflection would constitute the physical or active optics of the time of the speed of light, an optics made active with the aid of visual prostheses that depend on indirect light. It can be seen as a typical example of the “unity of time winning over the unity of the place of encounter”, presence being sacrificed for telepresence. Her reflection looming large on the horizon of the screen, as Virilio states, would usher in a “eugenics of perception, a preemptive abortion of the diversity of mental images” (1994) such as her ageing self in this case. If the nineteenth century hailed the transport revolution, man’s conquering of real extensive space, through ports, stations and airports, the twentieth century hailed the transmission revolution. It is no longer the case that the person be mobilised to be presented with the image according to the law of least effort. The transmission revolution is about the mobilisation of the image for the sake of immobility of the viewer. Instantaneous transmission crushes distance, extreme spatial distance gives way to the proximity of real-time exchange, but “how”, Virilio asks, “can we really live if there is no more here and if everything is now?” (1994). He states that the eighteenth century was the age of the images, of painting, etching and engraving, where what was dominant was the reality of the formal logic of pictorial representation. It had the purely formal aim of recreating what already existed in the external world. The proceeding century witnessing the emergence of photography and film was the age of dialectical logic that governed photography and cinematic representation. The twentieth century, however, the age of computer graphics and holography is termed by him as the age of paradoxical logic. This paradoxical logic emerges when the real-time image dominates the object of representation. In the age of photography, it was the presence of the past that was impressed upon the chromatic plate. In the age of the paradoxical image, however, real-time virtuality prevails over real space actuality. The present as Baudrillard states does not have time to take place and it can be added that it does not have the space either. The aesthetics of contemporary perception, of a vision industrialised by optoelectronic visual prosthesis, is termed by Virilio as the aesthetics of disappearance, The aesthetics of appearance of objects or people standing out against the apparent horizon of classical perspectives unity of time and place is then taken over by the aesthetics of the disappearance of far-off characters looming up against the lack of horizon of a cathode screen where unity of time wins over the unity of the place of encounter (2009).

The task of architecture lay in manipulating external inorganic nature so that it became cognate to the human mind, as an artistic outer world. Sculpture did not enclose three-dimensional space but filled this space instead. Painting penetrated the three-dimensional solidity of the sculptured object, and with simple direct light

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removed one dimension from it. Music took art beyond spatial dimensionality and poetry the highest form of art for Hegel was neither spatial nor temporal. Words according to him were able to produce the effects of all the other arts without material means. In the aesthetics of cyberspace, it is light, imageless in itself that is able to produce the effects of all the other arts without space, and now with 3D, we can be said to be penetrating the pseudo-solidity of the screen with indirect light. The aesthetics of the heterotopia of cyberspace is the aesthetics of disappearance and dematerialisation, where the visible is “doctored by the wild acceleration of ordinary, everyday representations” (Virilio 1997). The master craftsman uses light transmission apparatus to create the image which is instantaneously transmitted in real time. Space is a thing of the past, and the twenty-first century’s creation of a virtual electromagnetic heterotopia appears reminiscent of a phantom limb, “a virtual presence perceived as an integral part of a mutilated body” (Virilio 1997), and in such prosthetic space, it would be more apt not to speak of the aesthetics of contemporary perception, as aesthetics pertains to the science of feeling and sensation but perhaps of the anaesthetics (through information) of contemporary perception brought about by the extraordinary commercialisation of audio-visual technology, whereby “the eyes motility is transformed into fixity by artificial lenses” (Virilio 1994) and visual prostheses. The question put by Virilio, that needs consideration is why the presence of such a prosthesis of cyberspace, does not accentuate the maimed person perception of a limb that is gone as it usually does in the case of soldiers?

References Benjamin, Walter. 2008. The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media. In ed. W. Michael Jennings, Brigid Doherty and Y. Thomas Levin. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Einstein, Albert. 1920. Relativity: The Special and the General Theory, trans. Lawson, W. Robert. New York: Henry Holt and Company. Foucault, Michel. 1984. Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias, trans. Miskowiec, Jay. MIT. http://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/foucault1.pdf. Accessed 2 Jan 2020. Kant, Immanuel. 2007. The Critique of Pure Reason. London: Penguin. Marleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1964. The Primacy of Perception: And Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics, trans. Eddie, M. James. Ilinois: Northwestern University Press. Nivvre, Robert. n.d. Spatial discursions: Flames of the digital and ashes of the real. Confessions of a San Francisco Programmer Semantic Scholar. https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/1aa5/84310a 7c155f3768da3c737b91da306867a4.pdf. Accessed 10 Jan 2020. Plato. 1987. The Republic. London: Penguin. Virilio, Paul. 1994. The Vision Machine, trans. Rose, Julie. London: British Film Institute. Virilio, Paul. 1997. Open Sky, trans. Rose, Julie. London: Verso. Virilio, Paul. 2009. The Aesthetics of Disappearance, trans. Beitchman, Phil. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e).

Chapter 8

A Cyberian Turn in Pornography: Understanding Internet as a Sexual Medium Sakshi Dogra

Abstract The mass media of internet has made pornography, more than ever, part of the Indian popular culture. Uncritical focus on the moral, legal, feminist aspects of it only tries to mask the said fact. Since pornography is bound to be disseminated at a much larger and faster pace with the emergence of internet-enabled mobile phones, the counter-dialogue lies not in dismissing it but rather critically, academically studying it. A small venture is undertaken in that direction through this paper. My paper undertakes a case study of the events and discussions that followed the “porngate” incident in 2012 in the Karnataka state assembly. The focal point of this investigation is the import of medium and mediation in understanding the significance of a contemporary method of communication such as the internet. That is to say that the popularity of internet-enabled pornography is not only due to accessibility, affordability and anonymity but rather because cyberpornography undoes the traditional contours of public and private space leading to the emergence of a new space of public privacy. Simultaneously, with the introduction of genres such as amateur pornography, it produces an effect of realness and directness. Keywords Pornography · New media · Internet · Mobile phones · Obscenity · Culture On 9th April 2017, at around five in the evening, a pornographic video was played on newly installed LED screens of a crowded Rajiv Chowk Metro station. A consequent investigation was undertaken to reveal that three men had broadcasted the clip which played for at least ten minutes. As the screen was under commissioning and its Wi-Fi port available, the three men used their mobile phones to air the clip. This was not the first time that the relationship between sex and cellular phones became a topic for national news in India. In 2004, the DPS MMS scandal had generated a lot of debate. The episode revolved around two students of Delhi Public School, R. K. Puram who had shot their “intimate moment” using a cell phone camera. The pornographic clip was then circulated S. Dogra (B) Department of English, Gargi College, New Delhi, India e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 S. Malhotra et al. (eds.), Inhabiting Cyberspace in India, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-9934-7_8

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through MMS and also put on auction on the online trading portal Baazee.com. Subsequently, the concerned students were rusticated, and Avnish Bajaj, the CEO of Baazee.com, was summoned by the High Court. The scandal called attention to how cell phones in India were increasingly becoming the physical technological apparatus on which pornographic content was circulated and consumed. It was in the Karnataka state assembly, in 2012, that internet-enabled pornography made one of its most publicized appearances. The furore concerned the three ministers who were captured by a local television channel while they were watching porn on the cell phone. The debates that followed impinged on the deficiency of any moral compass of the ministers, on debarring the local private channels from recording and transmitting, and typically on the embarrassment and vote bank that the incident might cost the BJP government. The problem that pornography poses when it gets circulated by the medium such as the internet, which is marked by pace, by ubiquity and a hassle-free access with the advent of 4G and smartphones was eschewed. In the aftermath of the incident, the clip that was being viewed by the ministers became the most sought after video in the market, reported the official website of Times of India. According to the dealers, people had been flocking in large numbers; however, the venders did not have the clip in DVD format just then. While the venders were trying to procure the clip someone uploaded it. The dealers said that they would not anyway fetch much money from the clip. One of them was noted as saying “There are very few buyers of such CDs, porn or otherwise. Most people download such stuff” (Dev 2012). The incident stands testimony to the fact that online porn has permeated into the culture and solicits vast consumers. In the course of this paper, an attempt will be made to look closely at the Karnataka “porngate” incident and to elucidate with examples the argument that internet-enabled pornography blurs the boundary between what is pornography and what is not, between the subject and the object (through the case of amateur pornography) and more pertinently between what is public and private in the age of online pornography. This case study will end by making a case for a critical study of online pornography instead of charting the phenomenon in the light of moral, legal or even feminist debates. It seems pertinent to begin the argument by positing certain observations regarding pornography and its dissemination and consumption on/through the internet. Michael Uebel in his essay “Toward a Symptomatology of Cyberporn” argues that “The virtual reality of porn today is that, with about 70,000 sex-related Web sites generating as much as 15% of an $8 billion industry in the US alone, the contours of its demand, consumption, and enjoyment are radically shifting” (1999). Mark Griffiths while making observations on internet sex addiction quotes A. Cooper whose research makes an attempt to explain how and why online relationships and affairs occur. A. Cooper gives a three-tier model that has led to “increased online sexuality” (2001). Accessibility, affordability and anonymity are according to him the three characteristic features of the internet that facilitate a ground for sexual activity. The Google trends report 2011 was monumental in shedding light on the internet porn trend of our country. From 2010 to 2012, the “volume index” for the term “porn” had doubled in the country. Seven Indian cities made it to the top 10, in the

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world, on porn search. According to an IMRB survey, one out of five mobile users in India wanted adult content on his/her 3G-enabled phone. From the much-debated, later banned Indian website www.savitabhabhi.com to porn star Sunny Leone who featured in the popular reality television show Big Boss 5, the country’s need for a mainstream internet porn culture seems only to have grown. The central context of the paper is a comment that was made during a talk show on IBN live. The concerned talk show, that aired immediately after the Karnataka assembly incident, had Rajdeep Sardesai circulating debates concerning the moral and hypocritical aspects of the case. The likes of Suhel Seth, Managing Partner, Counselage; Ranjana Kumari, Director, Centre for Social Research and Public Women’s Activist; and Madhu Kishwar, the editor of Manushi: A Journal about Women and Society were some of the names on the talk show panel. Where Suhel Seth kept emphasizing the “hoodlums” that our ministers were, Madhu Kishwar, spoke of the general hypocritical psyche of the Indian male. Ranjana Kumari however while making a case against the Karnataka ministers said that “I don’t want to deflect the issue by arguing what is private what is public; what is pornography and what is not”. The questions that were thus marginalized as irrelevant while emphatically proclaiming the immoral nature of the incident shall be unearthed as I progress. The first question that shall be addressed concerns the contours of the definition of pornography once it begins to be circulated on and through the internet. This shall be established by looking at the defence mounted by the ministers whence they were accused of watching pornographic video in the Karnataka assembly. In a turn of events that unfolded over the couple of proceeding days, Karnataka Co-operation Minister, Laxman Savadi; Women and Child Welfare Minister, CC Patil; and Minister for Ports and Science and Technology, Krishna Palema, gave explanations for their behaviour. They insisted that what they were watching was far from a pornographic video. They claimed to be looking at the rape of a woman at a rave party, since a discussion concerning the same was being held in the assembly at that particular time. The fact that the ministers thought they could seek refuge in the aforementioned denial is one of importance since it brings to light the de-contextualization that takes place when pornography is circulated through the internet. When any sexually explicit material comes to circulate on the internet, its context is usually peeled off. Where sites such as www.metacafe.com and www.dailymotion. com cater to people exclusively interested in sexually explicit scenes from Hollywood movies, others like www.kowalskypage.com, www.hotsextube.com, www.jeansvids. com and so on offer alongside usual variety, archives of sexually explicit shots from popular movies. The brutal rape episode from the movie Irreversible where the actress Monica Bellucci is violently raped and disfigured, appears in the BDSM category of innumerable porn websites. In the movie, the incident launches a series of events which are central to the narrative of the movie however on the internet, devoid of its context the “clip” comes to enter the realm of the pornography and the only function it performs is that of sexual thrill. Thus, pornographic websites cause the most aesthetically and sensually shot sequences as well as the most gruesome and horrific events to be consumed solely for sexual gratification. Online pornography induces a certain kind of depthlessness and inanity to these otherwise opaque shots

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and scenarios, thereby blurring any kind of certain differentiation between what is porn and what is not. Also, the alleged “rape video from a rave party” belongs to the bombardment of a new genre that has proliferated with the internet becoming a popular medium for viewing pornography. Michael Uebel in “Symptomology of Cyber-porn” attributes significance to the amateur genre which according to him cemented the acceptance of porn industry into “cool mainstream” culture. The amateur porn websites, he states, are “the most visited of porn websites” (1999). Zabet Patterson in his essay “Going On-line: Consuming Pornography in the Digital Era” maintains that the Amateur or Homemade videos first came to be circulated in the 1980s in the video stores. Soon, the porn market capitalized on the popularity of these videos and began to produce and publish them. The perfectly carved bodies were thus replaced by varied body types, and the stable all-seeing camera was remodelled to an obscuring, shaky camera. Zabet Patterson, while aligning with Jean Baudrillard, goes on to argue that In Baudrillard’s description the pleasure of the reality TV experience lies not so much in the voyeurism of viewing of the power relationship that it would imply, as in the way the screen makes an impossible real available for encounter… It is no longer a question of watching but of a hallucinatory “being there” while knowing that one is not “there” and that in fact there is no “there” i.e. no reality apart from its mediation (2004).

Amateur pornography can be understood in the same light, where any simple distinction between the subject and object is thus obliterated (Patterson 2004). Therefore, as has been elucidated so far, the boundary between both what is understood as pornography and what is not is blurred. Also, any certain absolute notion of a subject/object opposition is called into question. It is this lack of a neat and easy distinction between the subject and object that creates the effect of realness. The paper hereon shall address the latter comment made by Ranjana Kumari which impinged upon the public/private opposition. A refrain with the media, the public opinion and the opposition ministers was that “such activities” should be kept to the domestic peripheries of the home. The popular sentiment that any dialogue that contains sexual content must be relegated to the private domain was reiterated. However, the problematic of a clear demarcation, of axiomatic frontiers between the public and private post the medium of internet were discarded as irrelevant to the debate. The following postulations shall build up towards addressing this unsettling query. Porn videos today are remarkably varied in their appeal. The advent of the internet has only led to the escalation of the phenomenon with diverse sub-cultural porn videos such as “Anime”, “Incest”, “MILF” and so on entering the market. Genres such as “Hospital porn”, “Secretary porn”, “Stewardess porn” or “Baseball porn” tend to sexualize places that are meant for a different kind of dialogue. Thus, the hospital space which is essentially dedicated to health care and services or the classroom set-up that caters to an academic dialogue is sexualized by the kind of narrative that is dressed up by the content of pornography. However, this is not where my critique dwells, since this feature is not peculiar to online porn but endemic to all kind of

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pornography whether it is transmitted through magazines, through rental films or through the internet. The fact that pornography becomes ubiquitous owing to the internet; the fact that porn can be viewed irrespective of whether one is sitting in the parliament or an academic conference considerably obscures the due that is attributed to the content and brings out with more force the potential of pornography in sexualizing any place irrespective of the content that is offered. From workplaces to Delhi metro to local railways to shopping malls, online porn, thus, begins to permeate all sectors of activity. Since cyber-porn possesses the potentiality of sexualizing all spaces uniformly, any clear distinction between the private and public is blurred. Linda Williams in the introduction to her book Porn Studies argues that, Discussions and representations of sex that were once deemed obscene in the literal sense of being off (ob) the public scene have today insistently appeared in the new public/private realms of internet and home video. The term that I have coined to describe this paradoxical state of affairs is on/scenity: the gesture by which a culture brings on to its public arena the very organs, acts, bodies, and pleasures that have hereto fore been designated ob/scene and kept literally off-scene (Williams 2004).

The explanation offered by BJP leader and former chief minister Manohar Parrikar when asked to comment on the incident makes the argument more clear. When Parrikar was questioned as to whether what had happened in the neighbouring Karnataka assembly would affect their standing in the Goa elections, he said, “There are people all across the country who do worse things. Congress leaders have chopped women and burnt them in a tandoor…Then there was the Bhanwari Devi case (from Rajasthan). They were only watching and not doing it” (italics mine; Press Trust of India Ltd 2012). The implication of a statement like that reflects on how cyberporn has the potential to bring private fantasies to the public sphere. Parrikar’s comment, too, raised eyebrows for its immoral connotations; however, the fact that the representation of sexual activity, of something that hitherto has been considered private and domestic was being disseminated in the public sphere neutralizing any distinction and sexualizing all spaces equally was not addressed. Michael W. Ross in “Typing, Doing, and Being: Sexuality and the Internet” tellingly states that “The importance of the internet as a sexual medium is its placement as an intermediate step between private fantasy and actual behaviour. It provides a gap between thinking, doing, and being and especially, an opportunity to do and not be, or to type and not do” (2005). Thus, the public and the private divide are called into questions with the escalation of internet pornography. Since cyberporn, not only through its content, but more so through its omnipresence sexualizes all spaces equally, any rigidity concerning public and private seems dated. Also, when private fantasies come to fore in the public arenas, when the “ob/scene” becomes “on/scene”, a further blurring of the rigidity of the two realms of public and private unfolds. I would like to return to Ranjana Kumari’s comment on how addressing the issues of what is pornography and what is not; what is public and what is private; “deflect” the “supposed” real issue of what is right and what is wrong. The attempt of the arguments in this essay has been to turn any such comments on their head. The fact

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is that it is the questions around morality and censorship that “deflect” the real problematic. As elucidated, mobile phone-enabled pornography has the ability to firstly homogenize all sexually explicit material to make it its own. Internet is a medium that decontextualizes any sexually explicit content and facilitates depthlessness. There is no narrative development in this online mode of pornography, but instead an abundant delineation of the body. As Susanna Passonen argues, online pornography has the propensity of “overriding semantics” (2011). Therefore, online pornography or the use of internet as a sexual medium highlights the inadequacy of the representational framework in examining pornography and asserts the precedence of mediation. Also, the introduction and popularity of the genre of amateur pornography is tied to the rise of the internet as a medium of dissemination of sexual content. Here too, the discernment and execution of realness outweighs the prominence of narrative progression which is to say that the medium of the internet not only promotes the wider and faster dissemination of information and content, but also produces certain effects and affects that are peculiar to it. To continue, as I have argued, pornography today permeates into not only the closed quarters but also the public spaces sexualizing all spaces alike and rendering unfruitful any differentiation that can be made between public and private. Cyberpornography participates in the development of a peculiar space of public privacy facilitated by internet-enabled mobile phones wherein traditional rules of interaction and engagement are rendered obsolete. To conclude, the impact of the emergence of the internet as a communication medium is not only the faster pace and wider reach of the content or information (in this case pornography). Instead what emerges is an alteration of the very forms of interaction and engagement. The latter is expressed in the emergence of a public privacy marked by a compression of space and the effect of realness and directness that establishes the resonance of internet as a sexual medium.

References Attwood, Feona. Introduction: Porn Studies: From Social Problem to Cultural Practice. In Porn.com: Making Sense of Online Pornography, ed Feona Attwood, 1–16. New York: Peter Lang Publishing. Damayanti, Datta. 2012. Pornography on the Internet hits Indian society. India Today. http://indiat oday.intoday.in/story/pornography-on-the-internet-hits-indian-society-sunny-leone/1/174081. Accessed 25 April 2020. Dev, Arun. 2012. Porngate: High demand for Karnataka ministers MMS. Times of India. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/bengaluru/Porngate-High-demand-for-Karnat aka-ministers-MMS/articleshow/11815852.cms. Griffiths, Mark. 2001. Sex on the Internet: Observations and Implications for Internet Sex Addiction. The Journal of Sex ResearchVol. 38 (4): 333–342. Khan, Imran. 2012. Karnataka ministers can’t tell porn from a documentary. Tehelka. http://arc hive.is/VtdaV. Accessed January 12, 2020. Lokpal, Jan. BJP Sex Gate Sleaze gate Karnataka in Parliament Assembly watching Porn on mobile cell SHAME SHAME. YouTube video, 13:21. February 12, 2009. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=eFpd5tzG78c.

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McLuhan, Marshall. 1994. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Cambridge and London: The MIT Press. Paasonen, Susanna. 2011. Carnal Resonance: Affect and Online Pornography. Cambridge and London: The MIT Press. Patterson, Zabit. 2004. Going On-line: Consuming Pornography in the digital Era. In Porn Studies, ed. Linda Williams, 104–126. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Press Trust of India Ltd. 2012. Karnataka ministers were only watching porn and not doing it: Parrikar. Times of India. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Karnataka-ministers-wereonly-watching-porn-and-not-doing-it-Parrikar/articleshow/11825010.cms. Accessed January 10, 2020. Ross, Michael W. 2005. Typing, Doing, and Being: Sexuality and the Internet. The Journal of Sex ResearchVol. 42No. 4: 342–352. Uebel, Michael. 1999. Towards a Symtomatology of Cyberporn. In Theory and Event Volume 3. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/47410182_Toward_a_Symptomatology_of_Cybe rporn. Accessed 26 April 2020. Williams, Linda. 2004. Porn Studies: Proliferating Pornographies On/Scene: An Introduction. In Porn Studies, ed. Linda Williams, 1–26. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Chapter 9

‘Yeh Bik Gai Hai Gormint’ Understanding Meme Culture in India Kanika Sharma

Abstract This paper will try to investigate memes generated, enjoyed and popularized in India, and then largely through the study of the form of a meme, it tries to understand as to what makes a meme relevant. The ease of production and consumption and the popularity of memes in general, forces one to question, how a meme goes on to document seemingly fleeting episode present in public domain and through different social commentaries on the same episode, archives it into an ever circuitous and constantly recurring trope etched in cultural memory. The paper will also argue that these memes when read as instances of cultural politics hold a larger potential for academic research as it presents an untapped domain of rich cultural memory and collective identity that it envelopes within its not so serious garb of seemingly fleeting and ever drifting satirically dank social commentary. Keywords Meme · Meme culture · Meme india · Political meme · Meme making · Cultural memory · Collective memory

Introduction ‘Ye bik Gai Hai Gormint’ is one of the most popular and shared meme as well as the most reused template since its first occurrence in 2017, not only did it create a remarkable Internet sensation in India, it reached to US social media and they created their own versions of the meme, as the core truth (this government is sold) rang true globally. The original video from which this meme was taken, traced back to an interview of a Pakistani woman for a news channel, which was hailed as truthful depiction of corrupt politicians as visionary, Aunty Gormint (as she is popularly called) unabashedly shouted expletives. The popularity of the meme also kept increasing as after a year post its release the original video got its own rap song mashup and the meme even got its own line of merchandise as well, and the template was printed on mugs, stickers, posters, etc. In this meme, the Gormint Aunty’s face K. Sharma (B) Department of English, Shyama Prasad Mukherji College for Women, University of Delhi, Delhi, India e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 S. Malhotra et al. (eds.), Inhabiting Cyberspace in India, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-9934-7_9

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is mapped onto the iconic photograph of Marxist Revolutionary Che Guevara which was taken by Alberto Corda, and the photograph was later popularized in various forms but mostly against a red background and words Revolution underneath. This same form was used by the famous YouTube Creators AIB, who posted this meme on their Twitter account with words Revolution exchanged with Yeh Bik Gai Hai Gormint.1 Even though this is just one of the many instances of the many popular meme templates, Coronavirus Lockdown Memes, Priyanka Chopra met gala dress Memes, distracted boyfriend meme, success boy memes, etc., the study of memes in India becomes an interesting investigation into tapping the constant social commentary on cultural and political events that is happening through the consumption and production of memes which has become the perfect mode of shorthand language for the millennial TLDR (Too Long Didn’t Read) generation. Not only it is extremely easy to circulate the memes through various social media platforms, like Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram, but it is also extremely easy to create these memes as meme generator websites offer set templates and text layout boxes with which one can create memes in seconds. Along with that there are now websites like Know Your Meme and Meme Base that documents detailed insights and research into the origin story of each meme and function as archives. And a simple scroll on these websites one can see that from local to global politics, to minority rights and gay subculture memes offer a varied range of commentary. In fact any complicated or dense concept is made decipherable through a simple text on a cultural image drafted as meme, the video titled, ‘history of the entire world, I guess’ by bill wurtz, which goes on to document the history of entire world through memes is proof enough that memes through its visual and easily decipherable content can be used to discuss and comment on almost anything under the sun (Wurtz 2017). This paper will try to investigate memes generated, enjoyed and popularized in India, and then largely through the study of the form of a meme, it tries to understand as to what makes a meme relevant. The ease of production and consumption and the popularity of memes in general force one to question, how a meme goes on to document seemingly fleeting episode present in public domain and through different social commentaries on the same episode, archives it into an ever circuitous and constantly recurring trope etched in cultural memory. The paper will also argue that these memes when read as instances of cultural politics hold a larger potential for academic research as it presents an untapped domain of rich cultural memory and collective identity that it envelopes within its not so serious garb of seemingly fleeting and ever drifting satirically dank2 social commentary. Before plunging into the depths of understanding how this happens, we need to understand the very form of a meme and what gets defined as memes.

1 https://twitter.com/allindiabakchod/status/829643668701192192. 2 Reference

here is to the concept of Dank Meme. Dictionary.com defines it as…viral Internet content that, due to overuse or passing trends, has lost its value or currency. It can also refer to exceptionally unique or odd memes.

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As discussed above, the meme functions on core principles of copying and imitation, which helps represent the participatory culture where the end-users and generators come from. As Limor Shifman highlights, Like many Web 2.0 applications, memes diffuses from person to person, but shape and reflect general social mindsets. The term describes cultural reproduction as driven by various means of copying and imitation-practices that have become essential in contemporary digital culture…Internet memes can be treated as (post)modern folklore, in which shared norms and values are constructed through cultural artifacts such as Photoshopped images or urban legends (2014).

The term ‘meme’ first surfaced in the field of biology to describe the spread of small cultural units from one person to another through copying or imitation. Thus, the term coined by biologist Richard Dawkin in his book The Selfish Gene in 1976 travelled a long way but it still holds the same properties as he attributed in his analysis, longevity, fecundity and copy fidelity (1976). But these biological tenets cannot be entirely mapped onto the cultural definition of what attributes the contemporary Internet meme and even though the jury is out on an official definition. For the purposes of this paper, I would like to focus on what entails the most decisive aspect of its form, which is the simple visual canvas which enables participation, the agency of creating a meme is often diffused in the process of its circulation and recreation, and it does not matter to attribute the first meme but it becomes about the exchange and immediacy of its humorously tapping the cultural public discourse. ‘Memes differ from iconic images and from viral texts that do not experience much alteration. They are never fixed symbols, stories or icons, but interactive aesthetic artefacts that provide a snapshot of the immediate tendencies of culture and public discourses; they can change shape, size and style through mutation’ (Bertazzoli 2019). Furthermore, the act of participatory culture is also one of the concepts that sets it apart from other visual mediums of social commentary such as political cartoon. Unlike a political cartoon, memes not only presents a diffused visual that brings together pop culture, politics and social commentary but the easily authored platform enables much larger dialogue than political cartoons. Thus, the successful meme becomes popular not only because it is relatable or witty but because of its simple visuals and decipherable content which presents a social dialogue with ease and instead of an intellectual discourse of one individual that is oft attached with political cartooning, and it gives the impression of a funny quip on cultural politics which taps on a shared collective sentiment rather on ideas of one person. In another famous meme on the ‘Yeh Bik hai Gormint’ template that was posted on Twitter handle @Awwdhikaar shows the meme photoshopped on a chewing gum wrapper with the caption, ‘When you want a chewing gum but you also think ab gormint mein kuch nahi bacha’, the meme plays on the context and also on the word Gormint as it rhymes with Chlormint a popular Indian candy.3 Also because of its highly connotative and visually suggestive content, it is difficult to censor it, as Anastasia Bertazzoli highlights 3 https://navbharattimes.indiatimes.com/jokes/social-humour/yeh-bik-gayi-hai-gormint-goes-

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K. Sharma Memes are strong in overcoming censorship due to the allegoric style of expression and ambiguity of the commentary that they carry. In order to read a meme, members of the audience often have to be aware of the broader political context and be familiar with this format of Internet communication. The characteristic of memes as ‘in-jokes’ has further advanced their exploitation for political deliberation in restricted media environments, and the examples of China and Russia prove so. (Bertazzoli 2019)

The meme creating culture in India is still at a nascent stage where creators are coming out in collaboration and discussing the cultural valency of memes. In the year 2018, India hosted its first meme festival: Meme Regime, which was the brainchild of psychology graduate Anuj Nakade. The event was hosted in Pune by TIFA Working Studios, featuring an art exhibition of some of the best curated meme on projectors or as printable hung on frames along with a panel discussion featuring Sangram Sadhale, from 4chan forum,4 Abhinit Khanna, curator of #artworldmemes, Karan Shah, a standup-comedian, and Shubhi Dixit, micro-content professional and a meme connoisseur. This line-up highlights the rubric that functions in understanding the meme culture, since the form of the meme is so transmutable and apparent, everyone is an artist and everyone is a viewer. The recent scholarship on meme is more focused on investigating aspects of why a particular meme is shared, Predictably, the consumer-advertising industry leads efforts to understand and create viral digital culture in order to profit from the frictionless meshing of participatory culture and consumer activity. Scholarly research, however, concludes that an affective “arousal hierarchy” (Guadagno et al. 2013) led by humor and positive affects (Shifman 2012) and followed closely by the evocation of anger or anxiety are key explanations for the spread of memes on the Internet. (Kumar 2015)

The trends are ever evolving but the memes keeps resurfacing with a fresh commentary on an old template and create a new wave of exchange. Meme Regime has become an annual art exhibition by Nakade and its 2019 exhibit happened in Goa, Nakade in an interview to Pune Mirror said, ‘Memes are one of the most democratic forms of art’ (Dalal 2018), he is trying to read memes as an art movement and theorize and understand the dynamics of meme trends. This attempt in the direction of understanding the memes as art is also functioning as an attempt to archive so many anonymous memes that can potentially be lost forever in the black hole of Internet. With more and more dedicated meme accounts on Facebook and Instagram and the shares on WhatsApp, it is indeed a difficult task to archive these and especially when there is blurring of types and commentary. For instance, a meme template which surfaced first in 2015 and is known as ‘Distracted Boyfriend’ keeps resurfacing with new commentary, the meme template shows a guy checking out another woman from behind while the woman alongside him holding his hand looks at him in askance, and the commentary on this keeps shifting as the three people from this generic stock photo are identified as different things or concepts. In one such meme, the template is used to take a dig at millennials and their fixation with Avocado toast, highlighting 4 An

imageboard web community of anonymous exchanges and discussion is hailed as originator of some of the most early Internet memes.

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their financial ineptitude and a lifestyle of mindless excess. In this meme, the woman who is being checked out is given the tag Avocado toast, the man is referred as Millennials and the woman holding in hand is given the tag ‘A stable career, property ownership, health insurance, an IRA, the financial stability to start a family’, basically everything that Millennials should be actually focusing on.5 In another meme, the same template is used to comment on the fascination and hoarding of masks during the recent coronavirus pandemic. Here the woman who is being checked out is referred as ‘Literally any Mask’, the man is referred as ‘Everyone’, and the woman holding his hand is referred as ‘Handwashing, Disinfection, Contact Avoidance’.6 As Wiggins writes Memes as artifacts possess both cultural and social attributes as they are produced, reproduced, and transformed to reconstitute the social system. In practical terms, the memetic social system is reconstituted when members of participatory digital culture use rules and resources of meme creation in the reproduction of further iterations of a given meme. In other words, the social system knows how to create a meme and that the creation or reproduction of memes may motivate the continued production of a given meme for an unknown period of time. (Wiggins 2019)

Even though the originating meme templates and some popular examples of it are archived on sites like Memebase and Know your Meme, it still lacks a documented commentary on narratives that erupt through these memes, which essentially gets codified in ever new patterns in cultural memory. Astrid Erll in the introduction to the book, Cultural Memory Studies: An Internation and Interdisciplinary Handbook, discusses two conjoined aspects of cultural memory, the first level which concerns biological memory, ‘is purely individual, but always inherently shaped by collective contexts’. (Erll et al. 2010) and the second level which refers to the the symbolic order, the media, institutions, and practices by which social groups construct a shared past…Societies do not remember literally; but much of what is done to reconstruct a shared past bears some resemblance to the processes of individual memory, such as the selectivity and perspectivity inherent in the creation of versions of the past according to present knowledge and needs (2010).

This definition can be mapped as is when understanding the functioning of Internet memes, so even though the individual works alone with meme templates, the already built narrative around a particular template informs more meaning onto the remixed or recreated meme installing it into the cultural memory of the collective. Thus, memes when read as reservoirs of cultural memory can then be mapped onto a sociocultural collective and one can identify shared identities emerging through in the floating wave of ever burdgeoning memes, which are usually discarded as the trend fades.

5 https://imgflip.com/i/3mwfrk. 6 http://www.joeydevilla.com/2020/03/03/distracted-boyfriend-the-coronavirus-remix/.

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And digital media also offers affordances to memes that has an ability to transcend categories and ideologies, exhibiting a far-reaching ability to capture the collective sentiment, Internet memes contain within them a semiotic meaning which is itself tethered to an ideological practice. Of course, not all memes are heavily rich in ideology, such as the rather old Doge meme. However, even the Doge meme can be remixed to convey a semiotic message consonant with a particular ideology. The preponderance of internet memes online and covering a range of topics from the mundane and the quotidian, to the sublime, controversial, and/or provocative is an outcome of the second reading of McLuhan’s the medium is the message: online communication structures and the availability of rapid access to people and information means a massive demand on attention. The internet meme is, therefore, a perfectly truncated genre of communication for online audiences, both real and imagined. (Wiggins 2019)

In 2019 elections, the two major political parties, Indian National Congress (INC) and Bhartiya Janta Party (BJP), took to their social media handles and got into a meme battle, all to woo the vote bank of 351 million social media users (Sanika 2020) of the country. It started when INC Facebook page posted a 30 s video meme titled, ‘a horror story’, with the subtitle, ‘Statutory warning: This video is not for the faint-hearted’. The meme uses the footage from Stanley Kubrick’s classic movie The Shining and the bicycled kid in the empty corridors of the hotel encounters PM Modi giving his speech from 8 November 2016, in which he announced demonetization.7 Even though one cannot ascertain the role social media and such memes played in 2019 election, the investment by political parties to use twitter hashtags and memes as political weapons is proof enough that they are trying to speak a new language to garner this new vote bank. Supporters of both sides unleashed political memes sometimes even using the same template, like in the case of ‘This is beyond Science’ meme. The meme comes from a scene in the 2018 Bollywood movie 2.0 Online, where the lead character Dr. Vaseegaran (played by Rajnikanth) advices others to activate the robot Chitti, saying that the ongoing situation is ‘beyond science’ (Know Your Meme 2019). This meme, post the release of the trailer, was used to comment on the contending leaders of rival parties. While in one meme on this template, we see a jab at PM Modi’s constant use of Mitron in his speech and extending the term to supporters of BJP as Mitrogen, the meme panel under action we see PM Modi shot from a speech with subtitle ‘Mitrogen can be made from gutter sludge’, and the reaction panel remains the same as the template with Rajnikanth saying ‘This is beyond Science’. And a counter mockery was targeted at INC candidate Rahul Gandhi in the meme in which under action Rahul Gandhi giving a speech with words ‘Aaloo se sona banana ki machine’ and Rajnikanth’s reaction which remains the same, ‘This is beyond science’.8 7 https://www.facebook.com/IndianNationalCongress/vieos/999824376884314/?v=999824376

884314. 8 https://twitter.com/soul_invincible/status/1040885049632026624?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ct

wcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1040885049632026624%7Ctwgr%5E&ref_url=https% 3A%2F%2Fm.dailyhunt.in%2Fnews%2Findia%2Fenglish%2Fntvenglish-epaper-ntveng%2Fs uperstarrajinikanthslineleadstofunnymemes-newsid-97273995.

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This viral phenomenon presents more than simple humour as the inside joke shared by millions, which is witty and relatable also exhibits a collective that puts a meme on the digital map in the first place, i.e. the meme will only come into existence properly if the collective agrees to recreate, transmit or generate memes on that very template. Bertazolli in her book highlights Memes are sharp and abstract at the same time. Sharp – as they point to the specific event, person or saying, and require the contextual knowl-edge of the audience to understand the joke. Abstract – as they often appeal to much larger narratives, stereotypes and ways of thinking. It is this interplay of two levels that makes memes fascinating to decode, fun to consume and revealing to research. (Bertazzoli 2019)

And this interplay hints at a narrative that is not just about the shared joke but why this particular episode accounts for in the popular opinion, what aspects of the collective identity does it unravel and how the transmuting humour is leading to targeted questions about the sociopolitical opinion that this collective offers? The insights that can be tapped through this understanding of memes from it being a dialogue or a narrative of resistance against hegemonic media (Bertazzoli 2019) to it being a form of exchange that a collective engages in, both as a receiver and as a producer, makes the study of memes an enriching academic endeavour.

References Bertazzoli, Anastasia. 2019. Internet memes and society: Social, cultural and political contexts. New York: Routledge. Dalal, Navjyoti. 2018. What’s in a meme? Pune Mirror. https://punemirror.indiatimes.com/entert ainment/unwind/whats-in-a-meme/articleshow/65597739.cms. Accessed April 21, 2020. Erll, Astrid, Ansgar Nünning, and B. Sara Young. 2010. Cultural memory studies: An international and interdisciplinary handbook. Berlin: De Gruyter. Know Your Meme. 2019. This Is Beyond Science Know Your Meme. May 1. https://knowyourm eme.com/memes/this-is-beyond-science. Accessed April 24, 2020. Kumar, Sangeet. 2015. Contagious memes, viral videos and subversive parody: The grammar of contention on the Indian web. International Communication Gazette 77 (3): 232–247. Richard, Dawkins. 1976. The selfish gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sanika, Diwanji. 2020. Number of social network users in India from 2015 to 2018 with a forecast until 2023 Statista. https://www.statista.com/statistics/278407/number-of-social-network-usersin-india/. Accessed April 20, 2020. Shifman, Limor. 2014. Memes in digital culture. London: The MIT Press. Wiggins, E.Bradley. 2019. The discursive power of memes in digital culture: Ideology, semiotics, and intertexuality. New York: Routledge. Wurtz, Bill. 2017. “history of the entire world, i guess”. YouTube video, 19:25. 10 May, 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuCn8ux2gbs.

Chapter 10

From Underground ‘Sutta’ to Mainstream ‘Kolaveri Di’: Understanding Social Media Through Changing Perceptions of Popular Music in the Indian Subcontinent Vikas Jain Abstract In April 2005, Saqib Abdullah, born to Pakistani parents in Saudi Arabia, recorded a song, now famously known as ‘BC Sutta’ at a live jam session in a Karachi studio and released it on Internet for free download. The song was downloaded 7600 times in the first 21 days, and within a month, it was being shared and downloaded all over the Internet. On 16 November 2011, the song ‘Why This Kolaveri Di’ composed by Anirudh, and written and sung by Dhanush was released on YouTube. It went viral, with 3.5 million views on YouTube and more than 1 million shares on Facebook within the space of one week. In between the two megahits, there have been numerous lesser hits, such as ‘XL ki kudiyan’, ‘GMD’ (a bawdy song making liberal use of expletives), ‘ye condom hai’ (a bawdy parody of ‘ye jeevan hai’ from the Hindi film Piya ka Ghar) and many more. While in 2005, songs such as Sutta and GMD were said to be ‘underground’, the word was not heard in reference to Kolaveri. The latter was monumentally popular and that was that. It was ‘mainstream’. That the production, distribution and consumption of such music are a consequence of social media is a foregone conclusion. However, such dynamics of Internet social media as effect this phenomenon still remain under-recognised and under-appreciated, the correction of which is the undertaking of this paper. In other words, the paper seeks to understand the characteristics of social media that have brought ‘agency’ back to where it belonged, i.e., the people, whereas cyberspace, which in the Sardarian paradigm, was another dark side of the West, seems to have turned into the site of renewed agency of the people. The questions that then make themselves asked include, among others, has the McLuhanian retribalisation of the world finally been achieved? Does cyberspace require a new understanding? What implications may this new understanding have for our future engagement in cyberspace? It is through the prism of the phenomenon of the underground music going mainstream that this paper attempts to understand this apparent transformation. Keywords Kolaveri · Sutta · Subcontinental · Popular music · Internet V. Jain (B) Department of English, Zakir Husain Delhi College (Evening), University of Delhi, Delhi, India e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 S. Malhotra et al. (eds.), Inhabiting Cyberspace in India, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-9934-7_10

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‘Social media’, as the term stands today, resists pinning definitions, and its meanings continue to be contested. This is hardly surprising given that among all popular media, social media is the newest. Theorisations too, of and on social media have not kept pace with its fast evolution. The causes of this gap are several, and they may have more to do with the very archaeology of social media which is ever-evolving than with any lack of scholarly efforts. Nevertheless, social media now seems to form a legitimate field of inquiry, as is evidenced by the works of, inter alia, Al-Deen et al. (2012) and Mandiberg (2012). The issue at hand is, therefore, one of exploring the possibilities that this new field opens up under the broader rubric of cultural studies. However, my attempt will be limited to understanding how perceptions of popular music in the Indian subcontinent have changed in the decade of 2000s, effected by changes in the relationship between the producer and the consumer of this music, as brought about by evolving cyber-technologies, social media being a prominent one among them. The scope of the paper is limited to analysing the shift in the said decade of what can be called underground music to what is mainstream music. To this end, I shall employ concepts such as soundscape, cultural capital and information technology as cultural capital, developed in the works of Susan Smith (1994), Pierre Bourdieu (1986), and Michael Emmison and John Frow (1998), respectively. I begin with a rationale of this paper by drawing a parallel between the silences that pervade, on the one hand, the scholarship on cultural geography and, on the other hand, the scholarship on social media in particular and all cyberstudies in general. Thereafter, my attempt will be to understand the cultural capital that ‘taste’ in music forms, and how access to and use of social media itself becomes a form of cultural capital which throws up newer configurations of the cultural capital of musical taste. Since I am looking at social media through the prism of underground music, a brief note on what constitutes underground music is in order. While several definitions have been suggested, some common denominators can be identified. It has been understood as an umbrella term which encompasses several music genres that lie outside the mainstream music culture. Thus, whatever it may be or may not be underground music almost always gets defined in opposition to mainstream music, in terms of creative/political expression, artistic freedom, its dissemination or the lack thereof. While mainstream music mostly relies on corporate funding by record companies for production and distribution, thus controlling creative expression too, it is precisely these traps that underground music seeks to avoid. However, the Western experience of underground music tells us that in the long run, nearly all music genres that materialise in response to or resistance against mainstream music genres get appropriated into/by the mainstream. This has been the fate of Hard Rock, Punk, all varieties of Metal, Rap, Hip-Hop and so on. Similarly, in the Indian subcontinent too, underground music has been constantly coopted into the mainstream, thus contributing to newer configurations of subcontinental popular music. The near-inevitable trajectory of contemporary subcontinental underground music is thus: it begins inevitably on the Internet, is mostly bawdy and explicit, has the eyes of the mainstream set upon itself, gets sanitised and then gets appropriated in the mainstream. For instance, rapper Honey Singh, who began with posting quasi-pornographic songs on YouTube has been signed by mainstream Hindi film producers. Although there is a considerable

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body of scholarship on the music of all subcontinental film traditions, there is hardly any to come by if one were to look for critiques of music on the Internet. Cultural geographer Susan Smith’s concept of ‘soundscape’ may help us find a possible explanation for this lack. Susan Smith notes that, ‘in social sciences generally, the “ideology of the visual” has afforded an epistemological privilege to sight over hearing, even though sound … is more allied than vision to those emotional or intuitive qualities on which the interpretive project rests’ (1994). By ‘ideology of the visual’ is meant the pre-occupation with landscapes in cultural studies projects, especially those of cultural geography. She points out that even stalwarts of cultural theory such as Raymond Williams and G. Turner have also been preoccupied with ‘observational strategies and written texts’ (1994). Citing other scholars (Pocock, Golledge, and Bonnett, and Macphail and Painter), she identifies three limitations of the visual approach. Firstly, it does not account for the entire sensory experience through which space and place are structured and understood; secondly, this body of scholarship excludes the experiences of the visually impaired, and thirdly, it excludes sound as an art form from the understanding of human geography. Smith’s views on this gap in cultural studies have found resonance with other authors. For instance, Tariq Jazeel makes the larger point that ‘geographers have been reluctant to treat music as a cultural product’ (2005) and qualifies this point for social sciences by saying that ‘the analysis of music within the social sciences raises inherently geographical questions, particularly around how it shapes social spaces of identity, belonging and community’ (2005). The argument of this paper emerges from the connections between identity, belonging and community as contingent on cyber-soundscape in general, and social media in particular, and Bourdieu’s ideation of cultural capital. While culture studies, in general, have sought to correct the visual bias in the preceding two decades, the study of cybercultures has tended to follow this bias, severely limiting our understanding of the digital culture. Cyberstudies are still engaged with questions pertaining to archaeology of cyberspaces, Internet pornography, cyborgs, memes, online fan-fictions and so on and so forth. The research on sounds of cyberspace, or cyber-soundscape, is severely limited. A fine example of this lack are the two editions of seminal collection of essays on cyberculture, entitled The Cybercultures Reader, whose first edition was brought out by David Bell and Barbara Kennedy in 2000, and updated into a second edition in 2007. In both the editions, the contributing scholars have not thought it pertinent to engage with the aural component of the cyber. Further, even scholarly works that take social media as their primary engagement have not addressed the aural, preferring to investigate only the textual and the visual in the main.1 It is here that I suggest the investigation of the cyber-aural as well to attempt a fuller understanding of cybercultures. Of course, it is near impossible to explore the entire cyber-soundscape within the space of a short paper. The spectrum of cyber-soundscape is immensely broad and may include sounds such as the beep of an error message, computer bootup/shutdown sounds, sound of an incoming or outgoing email or IM message, the background score of online/offline computer games, music and so on and so forth, and could form the 1 See,

e.g., Mandiberg (2012), Al-Deen and Hendricks (2012).

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subject matter of a full-length critical project. Nevertheless, it should be possible to present one case study, if not many, as a potential opening into this kind of scholarly engagement. Thus, the query that this paper address is, ‘How has social media affected popular soundscape in the Indian subcontinent, particularly in the case of popular music?’ While we speak of subcontinental popular music, we realise that there is no one popular music on this side of the world. On the contrary, it is an extremely heterogeneous category. In an article entitled, ‘Popular Music in India: 1901–86’, Peter Manuel (1988) identifies film music as the overarching framework within which Indian popular music is located, along with other popular forms such as folk. Since Manuel, there have been two notable additions to this repertoire of Indian popular music. The first of these two additions is what came to be known as Indi-pop, which boomed in the late 1980s and continued to be hugely popular throughout the 1990s. Low-cost distribution and consumption, if not production, through cassettes and CDs sustained the Indi-pop movement, till the arrival of the Internet. The closing years of the 1990s and the early years of the 2000s were the overlapping years of the decline of Indi-pop and the rise of independent music which was produced by small bands, or at times, even by individuals, and simply released on the Internet for peer-to-peer sharing. It is noteworthy that these were precisely the years when Internet reach in the subcontinent was in its initial stages and social media technologies were not fully developed. With the advent of Internet, Indi-pop nearly died out, and independent music emerged in its stead. It is also remarkable that Internet has not displaced film music as the popular music of the subcontinent. On the other hand, it has enriched the subcontinental soundscape by making it possible for independent music makers to find an audience. A curious aspect of this independent music was that it provided space for the creation and dissemination of music which could otherwise be labelled as ‘underground music’. By this term is meant that music which because of its aesthetics will not find space in the mainstream Bollywood or cassette industry. Here, I refer to music which does not cater to ‘popular’ taste as such, but still manages to find an audience without attracting unsolicited attention from the mainstream. Unlike in the Western world where underground music has now had a considerable history, in the subcontinent, underground music was made possible only by Internet. Also, unlike the Western underground which arose out at specific historical junctures of cultural crises and has always been music of protest and subversion, subcontinental underground by and large lacks this political colour. Hardly ever is it directed at the political establishment. On the contrary, its main subject matter is informed by the immediate social life of its creator. For instance, the Sutta song laments the social disapproval of smoking and the censures that young smokers draw from elders in a society which is run by the law of the aged, or life issues on college campuses, such as GMD and XL ki kudiyan. Here, it is in order to mention a brief history of the above-mentioned songs. In April 2005, Saqib Abdullah, born in Saudi Arabia, to Pakistani parents, recorded a song, now famously known as ‘Bainchod Sutta’, at a live jam session in a Karachi studio and released it on Internet for free download. The song was downloaded 7600 times in the first 21 days, and within a month, it was being shared and downloaded

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all over the Internet. On 16 November 2011, the song ‘Why This Kolaveri Di’ composed by Anirudh, and written and sung by Dhanush was released on YouTube. It went viral, with 3.5 million views on YouTube and more than 1 million shares on Facebook within the space of one week. In between the two megahits, there have been numerous lesser hits, such as XLRI, Jamshedpur’s band Bodhitree’s ‘XL ki kudiyan’ and ‘gaand mein danda (or GMD)’ (a bawdy song making liberal use of expletives), ‘ye condom hai’ (an obscene parody of ‘ye jeevan hai’ from the Hindi film Piya ka Ghar) and many more. While in 2005, songs such as Sutta and GMD were said to be ‘underground’, the word was not heard in reference to Kolaveri. The latter was monumentally popular and that was that. It was ‘mainstream’. However, the use of the term ‘mainstream’ for Kolaveri is not entirely unproblematic or free of qualifiers and hence needs to be nuanced. Kolaveri was not mainstream music in the sense the term is conventionally understood. Although it was produced by Sony Music India, it was still outside the framework of film music, which for various reasons remains the subcontinental mainstream music, though later it was indeed made part of the Tamil film 3. Other factors that set Kolaveri apart from mainstream music included its vocalisation by an ‘actor’ and not a professional ‘singer’, its picturisation inside a music studio and not on a film set and so on. Essentially, the aesthetics of this song are deliberately ‘amateur’ and in imitation of the underground. Thus, what had started as simply an experiment of creating music outside the matrix of corporate music production, a deviation from the ‘grand’, had now come to represent the mainstream. The question that then begs itself is how this transformation of the musical soundscape may be explained. This may be explained in terms of both technological changes and its resultant cultural impacts. Apart from what has been discussed above, there are other differences that can be observed between BC Sutta, GMD and XL ki kudiyan, on the one hand, and Ye condom hai and Kolaveri, on the other hand, in terms of their language and their production and distribution. While all except Kolaveri rely on bawdy/obscene language for their appeal, Kolaveri appeals to the sentiments of young men who have failed in love and pokes fun at it. It is interesting to note that nearly all such songs are by men and addressed to a male audience and deploy highly sexist and, at times, misogynistic language. In this, the cyber public sphere only imitates the real public sphere which has come to be constituted as masculine and hostile to female participation. However, the parameters of this paper do not allow for probing into the gender question, and hence, one must return to the question at hand. The first group of songs was released as sound files without any visuals. Only searchable textual hyperlinks were made available. Also, the files needed to be downloaded to a computer and then played through a media playing software installed on the computer. The Internet only served as a medium of file transference and the consumer had to be in possession of the file to be able to consume it. On the other hand, the second group of songs could be downloaded to the consumer’s device if the consumer so wished and knew how to download, though it was not necessarily required. Mere online access to the media files was sufficient, and possession was not required. This was made possible by Web 2.0 technological platforms such as

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YouTube and Facebook, wherein the media playing software was integrated either into the web browser or into the website itself, unlike the previous browsing platforms. Web 2.0 made consumption possible without possession. In other words, what Web 2.0 made available to the consumer was a simulation of the original file uploaded on a server, thus making the knowledge of downloading process redundant and making consumption more consumer-friendly. Prophesizing about Web 2.0 even before its emergence, DiNucci writes, The Web we know now … is only an embryo of the Web [2.0] to come … and we are just starting to see how that embryo might develop. The Web will be understood not as screenfuls of text and graphics but as a transport mechanism, the ether through which interactivity happens. It will still appear on your computer screen transformed by video and other dynamic media made possible by the speedy communication technologies… (1999).

It is from these prophetic words of DiNucci that the cultural argument emerges and dovetails into the theories of subcultures. While it is almost a given that music cultures shape social spaces of identity, belonging and community, it is also pertinent to note that what we may have here is a case of a subcultural soundscape. In his essay, ‘A General Theory of Subcultures’, Albert Cohen (2003) notes two key points regarding the emergence of subcultures. Firstly, all human actions, including those leading to emergence of subcultures, are ‘efforts to solve problems’ Secondly, no subculture ever emerges in its entirety in a flash at one go. Instead, the process of emergence of a subculture is always an incremental one, wherein an initiator’s ‘exploratory gestures’ are responded to and collaborated with by members who feel disadvantaged by the dominant frame of reference. If this incremental collaboration acquires enough members by way of ‘mutual exploration and joint elaboration of a new solution’, then the ‘emergence of these “group standards” of this shared frame of reference’ causes the emergence of a new subculture. In the light of Cohen’s theory, it is possible to say that the subcultural soundscape was made possible because the first act found enough supporters. If ‘BC Sutta’ had not become popular, it would have been difficult for others to follow and we might not have had Kolaveri either. While BC Sutta made possible by Web 1.0 provided the exploratory gesture, GMD and XL ki kudiyan made for the mutual exploration and joint elaboration culminating into Kolaveri made possible by Web 2.0. Thus, the cartography of the subcontinental soundscape came to be redefined by cybertechnologies like Web 1.0 and 2.0 charting new areas of soundscape hitherto unknown, and severely denting the top-down processes of subcontinental soundscape, with Web 1.0 initiating it and Web 2.0 taking it to an altogether new level. The subcontinental soundscape was top-heavy in terms of production and distribution which left hardly any room for a consumer agency except for the choice of picking or not picking a particular record, cassette or CD. Without causing an outright rejection of old soundscapes, cyberspace makes it possible for them to coexist with newer soundscapes, thus making media participation a part of media consumption. In that sense, the phenomenon of subcultural soundscapes leads us to newer understandings of cyberspace as a whole, different from that of cyberspace as the darker side of the west which was created only so that it could be colonised, or cyberspace

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as only a virtual community (Sardar 2000). Instead, in a McLuhanian sense, it is retribalising our cultures. As McLuhan wrote, ‘A speed-up … may serve to restore a tribal pattern of intense involvement such as took place with the introduction of radio in Europe, and is now tending to happen as a result of TV in America. Specialist technologies detribalize. The non-specialist electric technology retribalizes’ (1964). It may be said that the direction which the Internet technologies have taken in the last two decades and more specifically in the decade of 2000s has further despecialised digital technologies. Taking on from McLuhan, Logan writes, ‘A social grid of highly independent individuals gives way to tribal patterns of intense involvement with one another and a return to elements of the oral tradition’ (2010). It is here that the redistribution of production agency gives a voice to every individual who has access to Internet, thus turning passive consumers into not only active producers but also active citizens in the ‘global village’. However, this redistribution of production/dissemination agency is far more complicated than the above may suggest and is a terrain of vociferous contestations. In the first place, the debate centres on the nomenclature of the content that social media carries. While the capital intensive corporate media prefers to call it ‘user-generated content’, thus making clear its intentions of being the arbiter of legitimate and illegitimate content, others prefer terms like ‘convergence culture’, ‘the people formerly known as audience’, ‘participatory media’, ‘peer production’, ‘Web 2.0’ and so on (Mandiberg 2012). According to Mandiberg, ‘each of these terms defines one separate aspect of the phenomenon [social media] and does so from the specific point of view of the different actors in [the] system’ (2012). For instance, except Web 2.0, the rest of terms listed here are politically charged in terms of who gets to show/say/see what, whereas Web 2.0 is a purely technological designation signifying a second-generation Internet technology. Of these, the term that is of maximum significance to the present discussion is ‘the people formerly known as audience’. The term ‘former audience’ was coined by the American technology writer and columnist Dan Gillmor in his eBook We the Media (2004). By former audience, Gillmor referred to people who before the advent of Internet were mere passive consumers of news, but gradually turned into ‘citizen journalists’ once the technologies of news production became cheaper and accessible.2 Jay Rosen furthers this point by opining that ‘The people formerly known as the audience are simply the public made realer, less fictional, more able, less predictable. You should welcome that, media people. But whether you do or not we want you to know we’re here’ (2012). And that The people formerly known as the audience are those who were on the receiving end of a media system that ran one way, in a broadcasting pattern, with high entry fees and a few firms competing to speak very loudly while the rest of the population listened in isolation from one another – and who today are not in a situation like that at all (2012, emphasis original).

2 http://www.authorama.com/we-the-media-8.html.

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Although Gillmor and Rosen make these observations in the context of news broadcasting, I believe the argument is equally tenable in the field of music as well. With the proliferation of the personal computer, the composition and distribution of music could now be performed on the same device. Even if the composition was not executed on the computer, it could surely be used to publish it and reach the audience directly, and in the process, entirely bypass the corporate distribution companies. Thus, it was not only creative expression that was freed from the corporate financial muscle, but it also altered the entire dynamics of music distribution. Earlier, while the consumer was always at the receiving end, and the flow was always unidirectional, now it took the form of a conversation. The consumer was no longer just a consumer in the music market but in a retribalised sense, the consumer was also a music enthusiast, who could respond to the music in much the same way as a listener would in the pre-gramophone, pre-cassette, pre-CD era, when making and listening to music was always a communal and intimate activity, wherein the maker and listener shared the spatio-temporal coordinates. In other words, as McLuhan may say, the specialist technology of music making—recording instruments, cassettes, CDs, etc.—detribalised the act of experiencing music by making it a specialist activity, whereas the non-specialist technology of Internet and then social media, retribalised this experience. It is this retribalisation of the music experience made possible by social media technologies that now presents itself as a kind of social and cultural capital that Pierre Bourdieu first ideated. Emmison and Frow in their work highlight Bourdieu’s three forms of capital as follows: as economic capital, which is immediately and directly convertible into money and may be institutionalized in the form of property rights; as cultural capital, which is convertible, on certain conditions, into economic capital and may be institutionalized in the form of educational qualifications; and as social capital, made up of social obligations (‘connections’), which is convertible, in certain conditions, into economic capital and may be institutionalized in the form of a title of nobility (1998).

To put it briefly, cultural capital is the advantage or disadvantage accruing to individuals in a society, contingent on their habitus, i.e., the socio-cultural environment that they inhabit, or in other words, their position in the society vis-à-vis other individuals in matters concerning birth, education, access and control of resources and so on. Emmison and Frow, in their discussion on the penetration and impacts of information technology in Australia, focussing especially on the use of personal computers, extend this concept to argue that access to and the ability to use digital and information technologies is itself a kind of cultural capital, which forms out of the kind of cultural capital conceptualised by Bourdieu. Emmison and Frow conclude that ‘A familiarity with, and a positive disposition towards the use of, [sic] the burgeoning technologies of the information age can be seen as an additional form of cultural capital bestowing advantage on those families which possess them and the means of appropriating their full potential’ (1998). The authors argue that this extension is possible as they believe that Bourdieu’s formulation, though not directly related to competencies in information technologies,

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is flexible enough to incorporate these additional dimensions (1998). Following from Emmison and Frow, it should be possible to argue that it is not only the technologies of personal computers, but also the access to and the ability to engage with social media that can be thought of as a kind of cultural capital. It is this new cultural capital which—when it is utilised to make and share music independent of corporate control that—disrupts the traditional modes of functioning of the music industry, effectively normalising it, and rendering it as a non-specialised non-industry. Thus, whereas at specific moments of the twentieth century, the corporate music industry was successful in creating categories such as mainstream or underground, the social media of the twenty-first-century renders these categories redundant, possibly altering the subcontinental soundscape forever or for at least the foreseeable future. It is possibly for this reason that ‘Sutta’ was underground and ‘Kolaveri’ was mainstream. Of course, to conclusively demonstrate that knowledge of and access to social media does constitute a cultural capital, significant empirical evidence, as collected by Emmison and Frow, would be required. However, the arguments as delineated in this paper should be effective towards unpacking and opening new discussions in this field and lead to a fuller understanding of the phenomenon that social media is.

References Al-Deen, Noor, S. Hana, and John. A. Hendricks. (eds.) 2012. Social media: usage and impact. Maryland: Lexington Books. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1986. The forms of capital. In Handbook of theory and research for the sociology of education, ed. John G. Richardson, 241–58. New York: Greenwood Press. Cohen, Albert K. 2003. A general theory of subcultures. In Culture: Critical concepts in sociology, ed. Chris Jenks, 259–69. London and New York: Routledge. DiNucci, Darcy. 1999. Fragmented FutureDarcy DiNucci. http://darcyd.com/fragmented_future. pdf.Accessed. January 20, 2020. Emmison, M., and J. Frow. 1998. Information technology as cultural capital. ERIC Institute of Education Sciences. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ577680.pdf.Accessed. January 1, 2020. Jazeel, T. 2005. The world is sound? Geography, musicology and British-Asian soundscapes. Area 233–241. Logan, Robert K. 2010. Understanding new media: Extending Marshall McLuhan. New York: Peter Lang Publishing. Mandiberg, Michael. 2012. The social media reader. New York: New York University. Manuel, Peter. 1988. Film Music in India: 1901–86. Popular Music 157–176. McLuhan, Marshall. 1964. Understanding media: The extensions of man. London: MIT Press. Rosen, J. 2012. The people formerly known as audience. In The Social Media Reader, ed. Mi-chael Mandiberg, 13–16. New York and London: New York University Press. Sardar, Ziauddin. 2000. alt civilizations faq: Cyberrspace as the Darker Side of the West. In The cybercultures reader, ed. David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy, 732–752. London: Routledge. Smith, Susan. 1994. Soundscape. Area 232–240.

Part IV

Cyber-Narratives: Roleplaying, Interactivity and Authority

Chapter 11

Virtual Slaves, Real Profits Commodity Fetishism and the Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game Prayag Ray Abstract This paper seeks to trace the relationship between Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games and the economic reality, as well as the cultural and philosophical underpinnings of contemporary global capitalism. Using Marxian theories, it shall outline how commodity fetishism operates in these games, reinforcing consumerism through both production and consumption. The fantasy genre, with its dynamic of wish-fulfilment and the quest structure it inherits from the medieval romance, exacerbates this ethos in games like The Lord of the Rings Online, as indicated by sartorial extravagance and the fetishizing of luxury items. This glamorizing of and attachment to surfaces and commodities within fantasy MMORPGs is underpinned by an ontology of permanent lack, and a schism between appearance-forms and reality within capitalism. Later sections of the chapter examine the production and consumption of these games within the globalized world economy, highlighting the nefarious practice of ‘gold farming’. Finally, it shall focus on gaming in India, discussing why MMORPG cultures and gold farming have not become widespread here, despite India’s burgeoning IT and gaming industries. Keywords Gaming · Roleplaying games · Massively multiplayer online roleplaying games · MMORPG · Commodity fetishism · Fantasy fiction · The Lord of the Rings · Capitalism · Globalization · Gold farming · Indian gaming · Gaming in India

Introduction Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games (MMORPGs) are a popular form of online roleplaying videogame in which players assume the role of a character (called an avatar) and interact with large numbers of other online players in a persistent virtual world: one that exists and evolves continuously, even while the individual P. Ray (B) Department of English, St. Xavier’s University, Kolkata, India e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 S. Malhotra et al. (eds.), Inhabiting Cyberspace in India, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-9934-7_11

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user is offline. This paper argues that MMORPGs replicate, and thereby help to perpetuate patterns of consumption within late capitalism, by immersing gamers in an ethos of virtual consumerism, predicated on a fetishization of the virtual object. Using Marxian theories as a springboard, it seeks to outline the dynamics of how commodity fetishism operates in these games. The deep investment of players in their avatars leads to a blurring of the boundaries between virtual and real and creates the potential for the transference of patterns of behaviour from virtual to real. While this potential holds true for MMORPGs broadly speaking, the focus in this chapter shall be on fantasy MMORPGs such as The Lord of the Rings Online. Employing theoretical perspectives from the study of fantasy fiction, it shall focus on how fantasy as a genre contributes to the ethos of virtual consumerism. The chapter shall also examine the production and consumption of these games within the context of the globalized world economy, paying particular attention to the Indian context. In several MMORPGs, real money can be spent to buy virtual money, leading to an exploitative practice known as ‘gold farming’. While a slew of research articles on MMORPGs have appeared in recent years, particularly ones exploring their addictive potential (see Sections “Envy, Lack, and Make-Belief” and “From Virtual to Real: “Free-to-Play” and Sweat-shops” in this paper), this is the first work reading them closely through the lens of commodity fetishism and underscoring the role of fantasy as a mode.1

Defining the Terms An MMORPG is a type of online videogame where human players from around the world use the Internet to log on to and inhabit an open-ended virtual world. Within this world, players control avatars that they can personalize. There is no ‘end’ or objective to the game other than character-development through the completion of quests, and—central to my argument—the accumulation of commodities. Within them, gamers can interact with each other much as they do in reality, communicating, emoting, and participating in domestic, social, economic, and political activities. Commodity fetishism is a term generally associated with Karl Marx, though later thinkers such as György Lukács and Jean Baudrillard add further nuance to the concept. Fetishism implies the investing of human or superhuman agency in non-human things. In Marxian theory, the term ‘commodity fetishism’ specifically denotes the exaltation of produced commodities to the status of magical things, due, in Marx’s view, to the objectification (reification) of social relationships between people, and in later views, because of the preponderance of objects in the human 1 Important recent work on MMORPGs include Zhong (2011), Metcalf and Pammer (2014), Lemé-

nager et al. (2013), and Dickey (2007). Many of these focus on ontology and addiction. In her focus on the capitalist structures of World of Warcraft, Patricia Wang’s work (2006) comes closest to my own. However, my work marks a departure from hers in focusing on commodity fetishism specifically, employing theoretical frameworks from fantasy studies, and outlining the Indian context.

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consciousness and the mystique attached to them in consumer culture. As Laura Mulvey puts it, commodity fetishism is ‘the human ability to project value onto a material object, repress the fact that the projection has taken place, and then interpret the object as the autonomous source of that value’ (1996). Marx focuses largely on the fetishism that arises through productive activities, while later thinkers have shown that commodity fetishism occurs through consumption as well.

Commodity Fetishism Through Production in MMORPGs In Das Kapital (1867), Marx focuses on the fetishism that arises out of the production of goods rather than their consumption. Marx contends that the industrial worker is alienated from the product of his or her labour because of the division of labour involved in the process—the individual labourer plays only a small role in producing a finished product; the product is incommensurate to the labour activities, and is alien to the labourer. As Mike Wayne explains in Marxism and Media Studies, in the process of production, the subject, that is the labourer, becomes an object. In producing capital, labour produces itself as an object, turning itself into a factor in production to be used and dispensed with as required (2003). On the other hand, the goods produced seem to acquire a ‘life’ and agency of their own—the marketplace seems to function without human intervention, and further, goods in the marketplace enter into relationships with other goods. Thus, curiously, the object gains a seeming subjectivity. As Wayne explains it, the fetishized product of labour (the goods) become subjects with powers seeming to stem autonomously from themselves, in a manner analogous to how share prices rise and fall without an obvious correlation to the labour processes that produce wealth (2003). Thus two parallel movements occur. The subject becomes an object, and the object gains subjectivity. It is possible to compare, disparate though they may at first appear, an alienated factory labourer to a player of MMOs. The comparison, enabled by the production of virtual commodities—an integral part of the typical MMO—can be made on a number of grounds. First, games like World of Warcraft and Lord of the Rings Online [henceforth LOTRO] allow the gamer to create items through a process known as ‘crafting’. Like the factory labourer, the gamer must spend hours collecting and refining raw materials in order to craft an item. Second, they are to an extent alienated from the final product, because they are reliant on other players to finish the product. They thus become a mere factor in a larger process of production. The final product has properties beyond what she or he, as an individual, has endowed in it. There is a division of labour, and the productive activities of other players are necessary to supplement one’s own productive efforts. Third, there are marketplaces in these games that operate much like the real capitalist marketplace. The prices of goods in the market fluctuate according to market forces and seem to be unaffected by individual choices. The commodity acquires a life of its own, entering into relationships with other commodities, much as Marx described it doing in the real marketplace. Finally,

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in the case of fantasy MMORPGs, the items produced literally have magical powers within the game. The magical powers acquired by the items one produces seem incommensurate with one’s labour. For instance, a Flametongue sword in World of Warcraft will magically burn and incinerate enemies, but all one has done to produce it is to click a few times and ‘cast a spell’. One is therefore literally producing a ‘magical commodity’, with powers incommensurate to one’s activities, albeit in a fictional world. The conclusion we reach therefore is that productive activities in these games do fetishize commodities—both through the reification of social relationships in the virtual marketplace and through the imbuing of ‘magical’ properties to the finished product.

Commodity Fetishism Through Consumption in MMORPGs Cultural theorists other than Marx have underlined how commodity fetishism operates through the mechanics of consumption. György Lukács, for instance, in developing his theory of reification, argues that capitalism is increasingly commodifying all aspects of human life. The idea of the product increasingly permeates human consciousness ([1923] 1971). Thorstein Veblen, and later, Jean Baudrillard have pointed out that commodities have prestige value. In what Veblen terms ‘conspicuous consumption’ ([1899] 2012), people will often violate the law of demand and purchase goods as status symbols at exorbitant prices. Baudrillard, outlining the subjective feelings of purchasers towards commodities, which are imbued, through advertising, with a certain mystique, calls this the ‘sign value’ of commodities ([1972] 2019). The very grammar of MMORPGs, as it were, is based on the ostentatious use of commodities, consistent with patterns outlined by Veblen and Baudrillard. Many MMORPGs are set in high fantasy imaginary worlds, and this setting exacerbates conspicuous consumption. The basic drive for wish-fulfilment that underlies the fantasy genre is mediated through commodities in these games. Fantasy fiction allows for wish-fulfilment in a way that reality does not. Predicated on the fulfilment of ‘elementary desires, such as wishes for eternal youth, strength, and power; for a benignly ordered universe’ (Petzold 1986), genre fantasy at a certain level resembles and can be related to what Freud calls ‘phantasies’, i.e. daydreams and fantasies, the motive force behind which are ‘unsatisfied wishes’ (Adams 2004). Similar to the literary genre, fantasy MMORPGs are also premised on wish-fulfillment, oriented specifically, it would seem, towards fantasies of wealth and power. Any user can attain considerable wealth, can dress extravagantly, and can become a widely admired hero—moreover, they are encouraged to do so; these being the only teloi within these games. The only requirement is to play for an extended period of time, amass experience and virtual wealth, and buy the requisite signs of affluence and power—in this case, the most extravagant armour, the most ostentatiously bedecked horse, or the most powerful sword; in short, conspicuous consumption.

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Further, the settings of these games are often medieval, and medieval aristocratic sartorial extravagance is very much a part of these virtual cultures. As Steven Mullaney points out in The Place of the Stage, extravagance was expected of royalty and the aristocracy in medieval and early modern Europe. The power of the king was enshrined in the body of the king, and the consolidation of his power depended on royal ‘progresses’ or parades, bedecked in finery, through cities (Mullaney 1997). This feudal notion of social rank displayed through sartorial extravagance is strongly present in the fantasy MMORPG as well. The typical Level 60 Champion in The Lord of the Rings Online, for instance, is likely to be clearly distinguished by a bodily display of prestige: rank and class are clearly indexed by sartorial markers. While historically, the medieval period was marked by fixed social distinctions and low social mobility, the pseudo-medieval worlds of fantasy MMORPGs are not. What we find are the sartorial habits of medieval Europe exhibited in an otherwise capitalist world. Consumerism as expressed through conspicuous consumption is therefore at the very heart of these fantasy games. Ironically, high fantasy as a genre arose as a reaction to industrial modernity, and the impersonal grinding of the corporate machine. In J. R. R. Tolkien’s work, one finds a deep fear and loathing of all things mechanical or commercially produced.2 Even more ironically, after the success of the Peter Jackson cinematic adaptations of Tolkien’s literary classics, Middle Earth itself has become a profit-making industry.3 My foregrounding of the fetishism of commodities that occurs in these games finds ample support in websites run by roleplaying game addicts. In Project-Apollo, a website run by a self-proclaimed RPG addict, Mark Sach, he describes for instance, what he humorously calls ‘Adam Smith’s Corollary’—that no matter what destruction or doom besets the fictional universe, a shopkeeper always survives that Armageddon and can be found calmly selling his wares—the most powerful goods in the game— outside the villain’s castle, as if nothing has happened (2001). One may arrive at certain conclusions on the basis of these and other ‘corollaries’. First, during MMORPG gameplay one constantly engages in mercantile activities. Traders and markets are ubiquitous. Second, consumerist desire is constantly stoked by the existence of increasingly more powerful and valuable items. In Fig. 1, I outline the basic acquisitive drive that defines the MMORPG. Aside from promoting commodity fetishism through productive and consumptive activities, one might argue that MMORPGs also promote other facets of the capitalist weltanschauung. Chris Dede, for instance, argues that the safety of playing with an avatar, in a virtual world, encourages entrepreneurial risk-taking (1996, p. 165–175). As we know, risk-taking is central to the capitalist mode of production. Thus the 2 “The

revulsion Tolkien felt at what ‘the Machine’ had done to his beloved England … and the apprehension he felt at its ‘triumph’ in World War II … find abundant expression in The Lord of the Rings” (Huttar 2008, p. 11). 3 “The movie also led to vastly increased sales for the book. … The Hobbit sold an estimated 1.1 million copies in 2001 … and The Lord of the Rings sold an estimated 2.3 million copies, ten times the previous year’s sales” (Croft 2004, p. 3). The New Zealand tourism industry has also vastly benefited from the films.

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Fig. 1 Chart flow illustrating the chain between a player and items. An “NPC” is a non-playable character: a character controlled by the computer with whom one can interact to a limited extent, mostly to carry out mercantile activities. A “Crafter” is an NPC character who creates magical items (at a price) for the player. The virtual auction house works in much the same way as a real one

game could be seen as training for entrepreneurship. Secondly, these games promote the myth of social advancement in a free and open society. Michele D. Dickey points out that In most game genres the player is often cast in the lead role of the protagonist who must save a town, kingdom, world, universe, or some other domain from some impending threat. In contrast, players in MMORPGs typically begin the game as low-level members of “rank and file” (2007).

Players, beginning as virtual nobodies, can climb the ladder to status and success with relative ease in these virtual worlds. This myth also forms the bedrock of the ‘American Dream’, one that was further built on ‘a seemingly inexhaustible appetite for frontiers’ (Cullen 2003). The questing American hero compulsively chases frontiers out of a desire to know, conquer and cultivate. The very same ethos underlies nearly all practical activities a player has to carry out within ever-expanding MMORPG environments, suggesting that the capitalist weltanschauung underlying these games is informed and inflected by the American Dream.

Managing the Virtual Economy: Hyper-inflation and Cash Drains4 One interesting phenomenon that occurs repeatedly in these virtual economies as a result of the economic activities outlined above is inflation. We shall see that the 4 For

detailed analyses of MMORPG virtual economies, the problem of hyper-inflation, and cash drains, see Lewis (2012) and Ludgate (2010) in references.

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cause of inflation is the acquisitive drive, and interestingly, the only solution that can stabilize these economies is the creation of more commodities to demand. Inflation occurs because players can keep earning more and more money by completing repeatable quests and instances. But the number of goods and services that can be bought is limited. Therefore there is an excess of cash and inflation results. The first consequence of this is that virtual money becomes less important than virtual goods and items. Money can be infinitely earned, but commodities (especially rare prestige items) are scarce. In the case of some games, like Asheron’s Call, hyper-inflation resulted in gamers abandoning the currency altogether and resorting to barter. The end result is an extreme fetishization of objects, which are given value over money. The only way for developers to restore normalcy to the economy is to create ‘cash drains’—more ways for people to spend money. There are two popular ways for developers to drain cash, and both of them undergird the cult of commodities. The first way is to create expansion packs—the developers create new virtual lands, fill the lands with more quests, more monsters to kill, more environments to loot and pillage for raw materials, and most importantly, increasingly powerful and expensive items to buy; in short, virtual colonialism of the ‘terra nullius’. The second way to drain cash is the creation of seasonal or limited-stock prestige items. LOTRO, for instance, will frequently email gamers with seasonal offers and promotions—inviting them to buy, for instance, the ‘Spring Horse’, for only 100 gold, while the offer lasts. As they would at a sale in a departmental store, addicted gamers rush to buy them. MMORPG developers are therefore creating a culture of endlessly proliferating desires, wants and demands. This entrenches, within the mind of the unwary gamer, a philosophy of permanent lack. The following section explores this further.

Envy, Lack, and Make-Belief This leads us to ask what the deeper psychological effects of playing fantasy MMORPGs are. That envy and lack underpin the MMORPG experience is evident. This lack manifests in many ways. In a particular quest called ‘A Ring Wandered Away’, in The Lord of the Rings Online, for instance, the player has to satisfy a ghost—put its soul to rest by completing its ‘unfinished business’. Its unfinished business, as it happens, is nothing other than a quest for a ring of gold. To put the ghost to rest, the gamer must find a particular ring of gold, give it to the ghost, and put it to rest. And yet, as soon as the gamer wanders away from the spot where the ghost has been put to rest, and as soon as another player enters that space, the ghost reappears, so that other players can complete the same quest. The curiously recursive nature of this narrative, with its perpetually wanting, never-put-to-rest ghost, is a virtual analogue of the gamers themselves, caught in a web of never-satisfied lack. What might be called the metaphysics of lack in MMOs grows out of a very real base—the base of material relations within the capitalist ethos. Numerous cultural critics have outlined how commercial activities within capitalism are driven by a

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never-fulfilled economy of lack and desire.5 John Berger suggests that this economy of desire, underpinned by ‘the state of being envied’ (2008), presents itself as a remedy for or distraction from the ‘interminable present of meaningless working hours’ (2008). Much the same could be said for the function of fantasy roleplaying games. To many a working adult, they are escape worlds away from the drudgery of working life. Players of MMORPGs participate in what Mike Wayne calls the deeply ingrained ‘as-if’ structure of life in capitalist societies. Wayne argues that subjects in capitalist societies are deeply rooted in a culture of make-belief and that there is a schism between ‘appearance-forms’ and reality within capitalism. Caught in the web of ‘appearance-forms’, we are permanently detached from the base reality. Within capitalism, we are always behaving in a ‘let’s pretend it’s true’ manner (Wayne 2003). In MMORPGs, this obsession with appearance-forms manifests in ostentation and vanity, most notably indexed by extravagant sartorial choice and the fetishization of prestige items. In much the same way that we seem to make believe that commodities are more than mere things, consumers of fantasy, be it in games or literature, make-believe that the fantasy is (at least temporarily) real.6 The fantasy setting of many of these games aids and abets the perpetuation of these internals logic of capitalism. Western literary fantasy, with its roots in romance literature, is deeply informed by the quest structure; a structure wherein the hero is perpetually in a state of lack. Additionally, fantasy has the potential to function as an opiate for the masses, potentially deluding them from political realities. Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr. writes, for instance, that fantasy is ‘a literature of mystification that actively prevents its audience from using its reason to critique its social reality’ (2003).7 It emerges then, that the virtual worlds of fantasy MMORPGs, in economic, social, and philosophical aspects, reinforce and reproduce real patterns of production and consumption within late capitalism. The deep investment and emotional proximity of gamers to their avatars (Dickey 2007; Cogburn and Silcox 2009; Dibbell 2010), and the addictive potential of these games (Spain and Vega 2005), has already been explored in scholarly work. MMORPGs, it has been argued, tap into ‘intrinsic motivation’, a factor that fosters learning (Dickey 2007). Behaviours and patterns of consumption learned or reinscribed by these games thus have the potential to cross over into the real world. The vast amount of time users typically spend playing these games makes them extremely potent spaces for the reinforcement of the ethos of consumerism. From the perspective of the companies that produce these games, there are, however, more direct avenues towards profit than the insidious encouraging of consumerism. 5 John

Berger’s Ways of Seeing (1972), focusing on advertising in particular, is just one example.

6 Fantasies “assert that what they are telling is real—relying upon the conventions of realistic fiction

to do so—and then proceed to break that assumption of realism by introducing what—within those terms—is manifestly unreal” (Jackson 1981, p. 34). 7 On the other hand, Tolkien, in “On Fairy Stories” and Rosemary Jackson, in Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion, argue that fantasy is potentially subversive and politically radical. The debate regarding the political ramifications of genre fantasy is fiercely contested.

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From Virtual to Real: ‘Free-to-Play’ and Sweatshops We may now ask how companies profit from MMORPGs. To begin with, the game itself is a commodity, sometimes purchased with a one-time payment, sometimes requiring a monthly subscription, and sometimes ‘free-to-play’. The ‘free-to-play’ or ‘pay-for-perks’ model implies that while the game may be downloaded for free, real money will have to be spent after a certain level of advancement in order to buy premium character upgrades, commodities, expansion packs, and even virtual money. Sales, promotions, seasonal offers, are all used to maximize spending. Ingame advertisements are another way to monetise these games. Real money is thus exchanged for virtual money. This is the case in games such as Everquest and LOTRO. So much for the legitimate side of things. Some enterprising businessmen in developing nations—particularly in China and Indonesia—have also learned how to exploit MMOs for-profits illegally. Since labour is relatively inexpensive in developing nations, they set up ‘sweatshops’ in these countries and pay economically underprivileged people minimal wages, to sit in front of computers and play games like Everquest and Ultima Online in twelve-hour shifts. During these shifts, these labourers must make a certain minimum amount of virtual money in the game. If they fail to make the daily cut, they do not get paid. The virtual money they accrue is then stocked, and sold illegally in exchange for real money, using sites like eBay and PayPal. This phenomenon is called ‘gold farming’. While reliable and recent data on gold farming is hard to come by, some research has been done on the phenomenon.8 Richard Heeks’ comprehensive work suggests that gold farming employs ‘tens of thousands in developing countries…with global trade worth hundreds of millions of dollars’ (2008). More recently, an article in The Economist has outlined how, faced with an economic crisis, increasing numbers of Venezuelans are turning towards virtual means of earning, and that a gold farmer in Venezuela can earn $40 a month (2019).

MMORPGs and Gold Farming in India Given that the gaming industry in India was worth 62 billion rupees in 2019 (Diwanji 2019) it is worth investigating gold farming in India. Heeks rightly notes that given India’s significant role in IT offshoring, it might ‘seem natural that it might play a significant role in gold farming’ (2008). He notes, however, that India is not, in fact, a major site for gold farming. He suggests that the lack of widespread access to broadband Internet, and the fact that ‘levels of online gaming are much lower in India’ (2008) as compared to, for instance, China, are reasons for this. Informal discussions amongst bloggers on Sepia Mutiny suggest a number of other reasons: Indians, who have relatively good English compared to the Chinese, might prefer call centre jobs to gold farming; cultural factors might make MMORPGs 8 See

Heeks (2008, 2009), Nardi and Kow (2010), Hyukmin et al. (2016) in references.

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more attuned to China and Japan than India; finally, India may lack the widespread level of good hardware that MMORPGs often require (Manish 2005). A further reason, which commentators seem to have missed, is the relative lack of popularity of MMORPGs in India compared to other game genres, though this is difficult to statistically establish. Mobile gaming, at a 71% share of the market, takes the lead in the Indian gaming industry (GamingShow 2020). Within mobile gaming, battle Royale games such as PUBG have been the most successful recently while puzzle, strategy, and games with gambling elements are also popular (Niko 2019). A survey conducted by Cint suggested that only 4.36% of Indian gamers played RPG games in 2018 (quoted in Statista Research Department 2018). An article published on the important entertainment website IGN India, meanwhile, bemoans the relative lack of interest in MMORPGs, suggesting that they have ‘fallen by the wayside these days’ (Doke 2016). Informal discussions amongst gamers on a Reddit page, ‘What’s the MMORPG ‘Scene’ in India’, suggest that MMORPGs are relatively unpopular because they are ‘just not the craze here since there’s no mindless killing’ (tanayasharma97 2019); because the monetisation of ‘free-to-plays’ is a disincentive; and because of the dominance of more ‘mainstream’ games. Given India’s recent growth in the IT and gaming sectors, a growth that will no doubt be affected by economic difficulties in a post-Covid-19 world, it is difficult to speculate about the future of MMORPGs and gold farming in India. While, as Heeks notes, gold farming has the potential to create jobs and income, its infra-legal status may tar the image of digital India on the world market. Recent trends such as the development of free and one-time payment, low-cost MMORPGs are further factors that would need to be considered.9

Conclusion This paper has sought to establish a link between late capitalism and fantasy MMORPGs, suggesting that through the fetishization of virtual commodities, these games promote the values of consumerism. The deep emotive investment of players and the addictive potential of these games make MMORPGs ideal spaces for indoctrination. If mythology can be thought of as a way of structuring the experience of reality in human terms,10 these games enshrine a mythology for the experience of life within capitalism, and fantasy as a mode serves not to subvert or to offer alternatives to this reality, but to glamourize it.

9 Very

few MMORPGs are totally “free,” except poor-quality ones such as MonsterMMO, which is a text-based dinosaur in a world where 3D gaming dominates. 10 Northrop Frye describes a mythological universe as “a vision of reality in terms of human concerns and anxieties” (14).

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References Adams, Michael Vannoy. 2004. The Fantasy Principle: Psychoanalysis of the Imagination. New York: Brunner-Routledge. Baudrillard, Jean. [1972] 2019. For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign. London: Verso Books. Berger, John. [1972] 2008. Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin. Cogburn, Jon, and Mark Silcox. 2009. Philosophy Through Video Games. New York: Routledge. Croft, Janet Brennan. 2004. War and the Works of J. R. R. Tolkien. London: Praeger. Csicsery-Ronay, Istvan, Jr. 2003. Lucid Dreams, or Flightless Birds on Rooftops? Review of ‘Symposium: Marxism and Fantasy’: Historical Materialism. Research in Critical Marxist Theory, ed. China Miéville. Science Fiction Studies 30 (2): 288–304. Cullen, Jim. 2003. The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea That Shaped a Nation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dede, C. 1996. The evolution of constructivist learning environments: immersion in distributed, virtual worlds. In Constructivist Learning Environments: Case Studies in Instructional Design, ed. B.G. Wilson, 165–175. Edgewood Cliffs: Educational Technology Publications. Dibbell, Julian. 2010. A Rape in Cyberspace. JulianDibbell.com. http://www.juliandibbell.com/art icles/a-rape-in-cyberspace/ (accessed April 11, 2020). Dickey, Michele D. 2007. Game design and learning: a conjectural analysis of how Massively Multiplayer Online Role-playing Games (MMORPGs) foster intrinsic motivation. Educational Technology Research and Development 55 (3): 253–273. Diwanji, Sanika. 2019. Value of the Gaming Industry in India 2006–2024. Statista. https://www.sta tista.com/statistics/235850/value-of-the-gaming-industry-in-india/ (accessed April 11, 2020). Doke, Shunal. 2016. 10 Awesome MMORPGs Worth Checking Out. IGN India. https://in.ign.com/ world-of-warcraft-legion/88848/feature/10-awesome-mmorpgs-worth-checking-out (accessed April 11, 2020). Frye, Northrop. 1976. The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gamingshow. 2020. Gaming Industry: Opportunities India. India Gaming Show. http://www.gam ingshow.in/gamingindustry.php (accessed April 11, 2020). Heeks, Richard. 2009. Understanding “gold farming” and real-money trading as the intersection of real and virtual economies. Journal for Virtual Worlds Research 2 (4): 4–27. Heeks, Richard. 2008. Current analysis and future research agenda on “gold farming”: realworld production in developing countries for the virtual economies of online games. Manchester: Development Informatics Group. Huttar, Charles A. 2008. Tolkien, epic traditions, and golden age myths. In Harold Bloom, ed. J.R.R. Tolkien, 3–17. New York: Bloom’s Literary Criticism. Jackson, Rosemary. 1981. Fantasy: the Literature of Subversion. London: Methuen. Kwon, Hyukmin, et al. 2016. Crime scene reconstruction: online gold farming network analysis. IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security 12 (3): 544–556. Leménager, Tagrid, et al. 2013. Self-concept deficits in Massively Multiplayer Online Role-playing games addiction. European Addiction Research 19 (5): 227–234. Lewis, Sam. 2012. Advanced MMOG Economies. Flying Scythe Monkey. http://www.flyingscythe monkey.com/new_page_1.htm (accessed April 11, 2020). Ludgate, Simon. 2010. Virtual Economic Theory: How MMOs Really Work. Gamasutra. http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/134576/virtual_economic_theory_how_mmos_. php?print=1 (accessed April 11, 2020). Lukács, György. 1971. History and Class-Consciousness. London: Merlin Press. Manish. 2005. Why Isn’t Gold Farming Big in India? Sepia Mutiny. http://www.sepiamutiny.com/ sepia/archives/002684.html (accessed April 11, 2020). Metcalf, Olivia, and Kristen Pammer. 2014. Physiological arousal deficits in addicted gamers differ based on preferred game genre. European Addiction Research 20 (1): 23–32.

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Mullaney, Stephen. 1997. The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Mulvey, Laura. 1996. The carapace that failed: Ousmane Sembene’s Xala. In Fetishism and Curiosity, ed. Laura Mulvey, 118–137. London: BFI. Nardi, Bonnie, and Yong Ming Kow. 2010. Digital imaginaries: how we know what we (think we) know about Chinese gold farming. First Monday 15 (6): 6–7. Niko. 2019. India Snapshot: Battle Royale Games Lead in Fast Growing Market. Niko Partners. https://nikopartners.com/india-snapshot-battle-royale-games-lead-in-fast-growing-market/ (accessed April 11, 2020). Petzold, Dieter. 1986. Fantasy fiction and related genres. Modern Fiction Studies 32: 11–20. Sach, Mark. 2001. The Grand List of Console Role Playing Game Clichés Project Apollo. http:// project-apollo.net/text/rpg.html (accessed April 11, 2020). Spain, Judith W., and Gina Vega. 2005. Sony online entertainment: EverQuest® or EverCrack? Journal of Business Ethics 58 (1/3): 3–6. Statista Research Department. 2018. India: What kind(s) of Video/Computer Games Do You Play? Statista. https://www.statista.com/statistics/562403/india-types-of-video-computergames-played/ (accessed April 11, 2020). Tanayasharma97. 2019. What’s the MMORPG ‘scene’ in India? Reddit. https://www.reddit.com/ r/IndianGaming/comments/dauniv/whats_the_mmorpg_scene_in_india/ (accessed April 11, 2020). The Economist. 2019. Venezuela’s Paper Currency Is Worthless, So Its People Seek Virtual Gold. The Economist. https://www.economist.com/the-americas/2019/11/21/venezuelas-papercurrency-is-worthless-so-its-people-seek-virtual-gold (April 11, 2020). Veblen, Thorstein. [1899] 2012. The Theory of the Leisure Class. New York: Dover Publications. Wang, Patricia. 2006. A Marxian Analysis of World of Warcraft: Virtual Gaming Economies Reproducing Capitalistic Structures. Tricia Wang. http://triciawang.pbworks.com/f/marxvirtual.pdf. Accessed 11 April 2020. Wayne, Mike. 2003. Marxism and Media Studies: Key Concepts and Contemporary Trends. London: Pluto. Zhong, Zhi-Jin. 2011. The effects of collective MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online RolePlaying Games) play on gamers’ online and offline social capital. Computers in Human Behavior 27 (6): 2352–2363.

Chapter 12

What Is Playing Cyborg: An Investigation of the Gamer as a Figure Prabhash Ranjan Tripathy

Abstract The current paper is an exploration into the question as to whether the gamer figure that emerges in India in the 1990s can be thought of as a cyborg and if so, then what kind of cyborg is the gamer? Can one think of the gamer-cyborg as a posthuman, liberator figure or is the gamer-cyborg still all too human. The intent of the paper in asking these questions and problematizing the figure of the gamer is to launch an investigation into the more pressing question that one encounters in the wake of the Cyberian turn, i.e. how does one contemplate, comprehend and articulate the ‘new’ in the identities that are formed and acquired with the advent of what has been identified as the Cyberian turn in culture? Can the connection between biological and technological be the sole basis for considering them as something new? or do they offer a new subject, a new politics, a new relationship to power? Is this ‘new’ democratic, free of discrimination, and based on an egalitarian principle or is the ‘new’ an optimization of old and existing structures and modes of oppression? Keywords Videogames · Games · Gamer · Cyborg · Human · Posthuman · Games · Technology · Politics of technology There is a Bunny in the Moon for anyone willing to see it. —Joker

The Scene Mark J.P. Wolf in his book The Video Game Explosion: A History from PONG to PlayStation and Beyond (2008) suggests that the 1990s mark the last and most innovative phase of arcade games in America and Europe (Wolf 2008). These same arcade games upon their arrival initiated the first phase of arcade video games in India. When these games arrived in India, they found their way into small grocery shops located in nooks, corners, back alleys and slums of the cityscape. A typical video P. R. Tripathy (B) School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi, India e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 S. Malhotra et al. (eds.), Inhabiting Cyberspace in India, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-9934-7_12

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game ki dukaan (video game parlour) could be a small, stuffy, dark room with six to eight coin-operated arcade cabinets placed next to one another. India’s adoption of neoliberal policies marks the context of this arrival and its pace, the introduction was sudden and highly concentrated, i.e. the old games and consoles arrived alongside the latest. This high concentration of videogames in the market led to the formation of very colorful and varied game culture. Though India is not considered a lucrative market for videogames as it doesn’t consume new games and high-end consoles, the gamer exists and still plays on an 8-bit console or an arcade machine manufactured and assembled in some local chop shop and running a pirated version of a game from 1999. The current paper is an attempt to understand this new figure: Gamer. The aim of the paper in doing so is to address the larger question that the current collection is concerned with: how do we understand the new identities that are formed with the advent of what has been identified as the Cyberian turn in culture? Do they offer a new subject, a new politics, a new relationship to power? Is this ‘new’ democratic, free of discrimination, and based on an egalitarian principle or is the ‘new’ an optimization of old and existing structures and modes of oppression?

An Enquiry How does one account for the appearance of this new figure of the ‘gamer’? Can the figure be imagined as a cyborg? While the first question represents the aspiration of the paper, the second is the theoretical space that the aspiration would navigate. The choice of this space of navigation is not accidental; it emerges from a contradiction in game scholarship namely, while on one hand the gamer is often paraded as a rupture in the history of the ludic, as the ‘new’, the cyborg, cyber-athlete, etc., on the other hand especially in ethnographic studies the gamer is observed as evidently masculine, rational, nationalist, elite, and a practitioner of neoliberal ethos. How can the figure of the gamer be imagined as a cyborg, a post-human figure who is the harbinger of a new subjectivity, a rupture so to say and at the same time display a continuation of the very symptoms/problems it was supposed to replace? Given that we recognize the Cyberian turn in culture, and believe that it has created new identities that can possibly lead to a new mode of politics, which would further lead to a global reorganization of sorts, the question above assumes a crucial position, as its explanation would provide us with an estimate regarding the direction that the politics of these new identities might take. At this point, it is important to note that the cyborg figure as a cultural artifact created in discourse is a contested site with multiple claims by post humanists, humanists, trans-humanists, techno spiritualists, etc. Then the question really becomes not whether the gamer can be imagined as a cyborg but what kind of cyborg is the gamer? The gamer has to plug himself into the game and then lose himself into the game, leaving the meat behind, this observation has inspired many game studies scholars to articulate the gamer through the figure of the cyborg and also to identify

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and propagate video games as an ideal site to study the cyborg. However, in this understanding while the combination between the technological and biological is taken into account, the game itself remains unaccounted for, the game sets the scene for this cybernetic system to assemble or materialize, and therefore to a large extent determines the nature of the cyborg that comes into existence. For instance, the cyborg that comes into being when a body connects to the console to play strategy game differs from the cyborg that emerges when the body connects to play a ‘fighting game’, while one can be considered a managerial cyborg with high endurance, the other is an explosive, military cyborg with quick reflexes. A view that takes only the combination of technological and biological in defining the gamer as a cyborg, is inadequate to answer the question that the current paper seeks to address. In order to remedy this, the first task of the current paper would be to incorporate an understanding of the activity (game) that the technological biological is engaged in. The second task would be to understand the relationship between the biological and technological within the intimate setup of the cybernetic.

Games as Disciplinary Technologies In Book 7 of Plato’s Laws, the Athenian stranger and Cleinias, while discussing education, proposes that education has two branches—gymnastics and music, where music is for the soul and gymnastics for the body. Gymnastics is further divided into two parts: dance and wrestling. Dance gives the body rhythm whereas wrestling (boxing and pankration) beautifies and strengthens individual limbs. They discuss the role that gymnastics, horse riding and wrestling can play in producing strong bodies and predictable bodies for the state. During their discussion on this topic, they talk of how certain practices have given priority to the right hand over the left hand. This special treatment of hands as limbs, according to the discussion, creates an imbalance in the body. The balance narrative is central theme of the text. The balance between pleasure and pain is what Plato’s Laws seek to achieve. In line with the same theme, at one point in the dialogue, it’s suggested that anyone who changes the rules of a game does the worst sort of damage to the state because changing the rules means not only changing the body but also the manners of the youth which is a dangerous idea which might lead to instability in the state (Plato 2016). The paranoia underlying the whole argument forwarded by the Athenian is but evident. A slight change in the rules of a game might lead to production of a new creature with a new body and this creature would be an abomination in the sense that it would be different than the parent (previous generation). In doing so, the creature also threatens to replace the world of the parent. The threat of this possible annihilation makes the state regulate games and all other ventures that might lead to such a situation. In order to remedy this possibility, the Athenian stranger proposes a rather strict regime to regulate play which includes appointment of female matrons, who would monitor the public places like temples, etc., where children might meet, and create an improvised play. Furthermore, a residential school system is also proposed which would train

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children in horse riding, javelin, sling archery, wrestling, etc. To facilitate the creation of bodies or say to regulate play, the prescribed education is made compulsory for everyone. In fact, the children would belong to the state rather than the parents. These activities are concerned with sameness, produced by discipline and repetition. That is to say that the games in the school will be the same, and, hence, produce similar movements. These movements would be repeated over years through training. In this proposed state, any change in the body is not welcomed. A change in the body through laziness or improvised movements pose a threat, engagement with games ensures the standardization of the body. Brian Sutton Smith observes the continuation of this treatment of games as technologies to construct bodies well into the contemporary schooling systems (Sutton-Smith 2009). Against this background does one read videogames as a break or even as a challenge to this historical treatment of games? While it is tempting to point out the differences that video gameplay offers, it is important to note that videogames retain their fidelity to rules like their traditional counterpart, in fact, it can be argued that videogames retain an even stronger fidelity to rules, e.g. this can be observed in the way cheating operates in a videogame and a traditional game, cheating in a traditional game needs to be detected, proved and penalized, in videogames, it’s impossible to cheat without declaring the intent to cheat first, as one can see in the deployment of a cheat code. It is but safe to state that the cyborg body produced by videogames, and the human-body produced via games are both rule-abiding. At this point, it is essential to revisit the conversation between the Athenian and Socrates, and note that there is a political investment or a political will at work in making sure that the rules of a game are followed not only during the course of the gameplay but historically and strictly, this for the sake of conservation of a social-order that might be threatened by the creation of a different body (the other) which unfettered play or play outside the restrains of games is capable of producing. In that case, one wonders do videogames produce a different body which can threaten the social-order or as techno-games, they fulfill this conservation project more efficiently than their predecessors? Videogames do change the way games are played in certain ways, however, they still retain the socio-political function of the structures we recognize as games, i.e. to contain, restrain or restrict play. An important note here is that game-structures are technologies that are created by a being that has an instrumental relationship with play. This being can be identified as man (human). Human intent engineers structures to contain play so, that play as a force can serve him, by playing within the boundaries of games he can live longer, become muscular, healthier, can propagate certain value systems based on competition, etc. so, videogames in their instrumental relationship to play, their fidelity to rules and production of rule-abiding bodies are a continuation of a ‘Human Ambition’. Even though, the relationship of play remains the same, videogames as technologies are more efficient than their traditional counterparts. To briefly explain this trajectory one has to look at another function that game-structure as technologies fulfill, i.e. Games as technologies are not only restrictions on play (free-flowingforce of creation). They are also technologies that prolong play, to make it visible.

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Not to say that play is not visible outside games but, play as a creative force as viewed by play theorists is a transcendental entity, it is free, without goals, and eternal; to observe play in this form generally requires a special pair of eyes that is possessed by the poet, messiah, a philosopher or the king. Play in this form can be imagined as fluctuation governed by appearance and disappearance, always escaping the realm of visibility. Game-structure as a technology behaves as a portal, where play is summoned and made visible (for everyone) for a fixed duration of time. Video games can prolong play and its visibility more than other game structures. They achieve this end by delaying exhaustion, to such an extent that it’s invisible. Each kick, punch or gunshot in a videogame is translated into press of a button; a slight flick of the joy-stick sends Mario running across worlds. Videogames provide the movement with minimal energy expenditure; this delays the exhaustion that the biological might experience while engaging in a similar activity (game) outside the cybernetic setup of a video gameplay. In conclusion of this section, it can be proposed that the increase in the duration of play and stronger enforcement of rules are two features that establish videogames as more efficient systems than traditional games, videogames are still carriers of what has been earlier identified as the human ambition.

The Relationship Between Biological and Technological The relationship the biological has with the technological within the cybernetic setup would shed light on the nature of the cyborg that appears through this setup. As mentioned earlier in the essay the cyborg remains a contested site with various claims of humanism and posthumanism, the claims differ from one another largely on the basis of how the relationship between the organism and machine is imagined. For instance, one of the many reasons why Donna Haraway finds the cyborg as significant for feminist politics is that it holds a possibility of a new relationship between the mechanic and organic. According to her, the western traditions have always imagined and explained this relationship in terms of a border war, this imagination is central to the white/male racist/father-centric/capitalist world view that the figure of the man embodies (Haraway 2013). Rosi Bradotti in a similar vein observes that advanced capitalism is marked by the way the global economy has taken a technoscientific structure and commodified life itself. She argues that advanced capitalism has unified all species—man, machine, and animal—for the purpose of commodification. She calls this unity posthuman predicament, which is global. However, she also sees this as a moment where a new subjectivity can be proposed based on feminity, empathy, senses, love, etc. as opposed to masculinity, rationality, war, and mind which define the human subject (Braidotti 2013). Both, Bradotti and Haraway target a particular mode of relationship that human has with machine or technology, this relationship that human has with technology is constitutive of what it means to be human.

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To theorists such as Claudia Springer, the figure of the cyborg is a fascist fantasy. She argues that though it destroys the male body by adding technological enhancements to it, the cyborg figures preserve male superiority. Cyborg figures in popular media, even in destroying the human preserve, the patriarchal gender roles. They present a world where there are no humans but things are gendered and male superiority is sustained even after human has been sacrificed (Springer 1991). According to, Alison Muri the cyborg figure is not a radical break from the notion of humans and everything that Claudia Springer suggests precisely because it is a continuation of the human. She understands the cyborg by locating its origins in the enlightenment man–machine. She argues that both the figure of the cyborg and the man–machine can/could be conjured in discourse because they are driven by the same logic: that the same laws of physics are capable of explaining both the animate and the inanimate, the logic is what she calls as an essential unity of matter. The cyborg figure exists, as did the man-machine, not because boundaries between human and machine have dissolved but because of the assumption extending back to ancient Greek philosophy of an essential unity of matter, whether machine, nature, or organism. (Muri 2007)

N. Katherine Hayles further informs the argument by suggesting that the whole cybernetic discourse is constructed around the idea of a seamless flow of information between the biological and technological. This view is largely achieved by an acceptance of the superiority of mind over the body as it exists both in the western philosophical traditions and popular cultural perception. To be a cyborg within this world view is to accept that information is not only distinct from materiality but in more fundamental to life itself (Hayles 1999). Let us look at a few instances where the gamer has been imagined as a cyborg, in order to gauge the nature of the relationship between the technological and the biological. According to Ted Friedman to play a computer game is to internalize the logic of the program and in doing so they enable the gamer to experience a unique perspective. The gamer not only thinks like a machine but also learns how to enjoy new kinds of stories (Friedman 1999). Martti Lahti also imagines the gamer as a cyborg. For him, video games are sites that ‘epitomize a new cyborgian relationship with entertainment technologies’ (Lahti 2003). He argues that video games are sites where a transgression between body and technology takes place, a transgression that is characteristic of contemporary cultures. He proposes that ‘(video) games commodify our cyborg desires’. They invite us to learn repetitive movements and restructure the body and bodily experience. Similarly, Dovey and Kennedy identify the figure of the cyborg as crucial to study and understand game cultures. They propose that video gameplay should be seen as a cybernetic performance and the gameplay can lead to the creation of a cyber-athlete. However, the cyborg comes into existence only for the duration of the gameplay, when he is part of the cybernetic machine (Dovey and Kennedy 2006). These are but a few of the instances illustrating the way the gamer is imagined as a cyborg within game scholarship. This imagination is largely dominated by tropes like: ‘thinking like a machine’, ‘desires to become cyborg’, ‘cyber athleticism’ etc. These tropes either entertain an

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instrumentalist view of technology: technology would expand the possibility of a human by acting as an extension, through which humans, or, the merger is seen as a process of optimization of the body of the human, which is largely considered as expendable within this world view. However, destruction or abandonment of the body counts for little as the way the subject is imagined remains unchanged. It remains a white, male, rational war-machine.

Conclusion What the essay has tried to do is to put the imagination of the gamer as a cyborg to test by exploring the nature of the relationship between biological and technological and also the activity that this hybrid is engaged in; in doing so the essay tried to expose that the gamer in its relationship to games (activity) and its relationship to technology is largely a continuation of the ‘man’. The aim behind this analysis was to drive the point that a mere merger of technological and biological doesn’t necessarily mark the creation of a new subject nor is indicative of a Cyberian turn in culture it might also mean optimization of existing disciplinary structures and indicate a move from a disciplinary society to control society. Another point that needs to be taken into consideration while examining, figures that have emerged in the wake of the cyber, is the politics of the technological artifact. The technological artifact cannot be considered as a neutral site, they are products of a particular political will in history. Philosophers like Verbeek raise important questions regarding the intentionality of a technological thing, technological artifact executes an intention, the intention programs their being (Verbeek 2000). For example, a technological artifact like a videogame is an offspring of the industrialmilitary-academic complex, an offspring of cold war technology. This history of the videogame is crucial to understand and address the issues of gender, violence, addiction, etc. in game studies. Perhaps before we become cyborg, it’s important to ask what an individual technological artifact does to activities that are historical, what is the nature of the love we extend towards our machines? And what is the politics of a technological artifact?

References Braidotti, Rosi. 2013. The Posthuman, 1st ed. Cambridge: Polity Press. Dovey, Jon, and Helen W. Kennedy. 2006. Game Cultures: Computer Games as New Media. New York: Open University Press. Friedman, Ted. 1999. Civilization and its discontents: simulation, subjectivity, and space. In On a Silver Platter: CD-ROMs and the Promises of a New Technology, ed. Greg M. Smith, 132–150. New York: New York University Press. Haraway, Donna. 2013. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Oxon: Routledge.

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Hayles, Katherine. 1999. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, 3rd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lahti, Martti. 2003. We become machines corporealized pleasures in video games. In The Video Game Theory Reader, ed. Mark J.P. Wolf and Bernard Perron, 157–170. New York: Routledge. Muri, Alison. 2007. The Enlightenment Cyborg: A History of Communications and Control in the Human Machine, 1660–1830, 1st ed. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Plato. 2016. Plato: Laws (Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought), 1st ed., ed. M. Schofield, trans. T. Griffith. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Springer, Claudia. 1991. The pleasure of the interface, Screen XXXII (3): 303–323. Sutton-Smith, Brian. 2009. The Ambiguity of Play. London: Harvard University Press. Verbeek, Peter-Paul. 2000. What Things Do: Philosophical Reflections on Technology, Agency and Design. Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press. Wolf, Mark J.P. 2008. The Video Game Explosion: A History from PONG to Playstation and Beyond. London: Greenwood Press.

Chapter 13

Encountering Digital Hypertext Fiction: Postmodern Potentialities of a Cyborg Reader Janhavi Mittal

Keywords Hypertext · Monstrous · Postmodern · Cyborg · Non-human · Frankenstein The cyberian turn in the 1990s has unarguably amplified the innovative potential of technology, making it the laboratory of postmodern experimentation. While this permitted an explosion in various mediums of culture, its inventiveness when it came to the field of literature presented a moment to return both to the singularity of literature—a turn to literature’s inventiveness, but also highlighted the singularity of the reader. In this paper, I’ll try to underscore a certain concomitance between the experimentation in form enabled by rapid advances in technology, the psychosocio conditions of its users, and postmodern notions of text. More specifically, it is through the lens of digitised literary hypertext that I wish to approach the postmodern fragment and the interstice of new reading practices that could potentially be opened up by it. A meeting ground of critical theory and technology, hyper-media fiction has the potential to gauge most closely, the contemporary discourse on the body and situate it in the larger framework of gender issues, identity formation and embodiment. Envisioned by Vannevar Bush as a dynamic system for organising information that would vie to simulate the mind’s associative processes, the term ‘hypertext’ was coined by Theodore Nelson and would refer to ‘non-sequential writing, a text that branches and allows choices to the reader, best read at an interactive screen’ (Nelson 1981). An uncanny realisation of the Barthes-ian ‘ideal text’, hypertext can be described as a ‘text composed of blocks of words/images linked electronically by multiple paths, chains, or trails in an open-ended, perpetually unfinished textuality described by the terms link, node, network, web, and path’ (Langdow 1992). J. Mittal (B) Oakland Institute, Oakland, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 S. Malhotra et al. (eds.), Inhabiting Cyberspace in India, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-9934-7_13

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However, it is this emphasis on the fragment that often makes postmodernist theory a much-maligned discourse with limited political or social potential. Leela Gandhi in her essay on the ‘Manifesto for Anticolonial Thought’ astutely traces the driving principle and the trajectory of the postmodernist movement as stemming from an anti-essentialist response to an already determined, uniformly homogeneous Marxist or Kantian ‘self-sufficient’ subject (Gandhi 2006). Thus, the first wave of postmodernism, in its propounding of a hedonistic sense of unchecked desire, expressed in multiple subjectivities over an essentialist principle of identity formation, was reactionary and equally solipsistic. However, as Maurice Blanchot in his, The Unavowable Community astutely argues that the Manichean divide was incorrectly polarized since the opposite to self-sufficiency lies not in self excess, but rather in a certain kind of self-insufficiency. With this regard, the postmodern ethics of fragmentation assumes a more political, revisionary potential. The ‘insufficient subject’ of this postmodern discourse entails with it an inherent sense of vulnerability, but also openness to the other, and acceptance and acknowledgement of difference without assimilating the other, or remaining close to the possibility of change. It is precisely this sense of ‘insufficiency’ that poses a challenge to the ontologically defined anthropocentric, organic subject. The reader engaging in this exercise of hyper-reading presents an example of a non-organic hybrid subject. Poised at the permeable interface of the human and the non-human, having recently dislodged the sanctity of the author over the text, the reader of hypermedia fiction is constantly deconstructing and reconstructing text, and harbouring multiple possibilities of the self. The hypertext reader, in this way, is like Donna Haraway’s figure of the cyborg that is both open to difference and is simultaneously vulnerable. This is particularly suitable for the practice of critical reading that takes place best without the blinkers of imprudent close-mindedness or complete naivety. However, before exploring the cyborg nature of this hypertext reader and the potentiality of critical thinking that the medium allows for, it is necessary to explain the much-cited, but less contextualised motto of cyborg anthropology—‘we are all cyborgs now’, and realise it is predicated on a techno-scientific culture, of both privilege and potential. Even as Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory points out that technology can serve as a social actor, interrogating the mutual exclusivity between the truly social and the truly technical, its potential can only be realised if made available to human actors. While on the one hand, hypermedia fiction presents the real possibilities of altering the consumerist attitude towards text to an interactive, even denaturalised critical one, on the other its dependence on expensive hypertext software or the far more the marginally more accessible hyper-net ones diminishes its practical, subversive potential. However, this is not unlike the trajectory followed by the material history of various forms of print culture itself. Postmodern fiction, both digital and print, continuously struggles to fracture the continuity of all-encompassing narratives. Despite the limitations placed on accessibility, the technological advantage that digital hypermedia fiction enjoys is that the challenge to narrative may be constituted in terms of drawing attention to the constructedness of the text. This is done not just by exposing the sutures with which

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the narrative is seemingly held together, but also by continuous metafictional references to its status as text which is frequently done by drawing attention to the media of its construction and often a change in the very medium itself. The medium of construction plays a significant role in determining the kind of hypertext produced. The staggering pace of technological development has led to a diverse range of software used for preparing hypertext, each proving to be a more avant-garde laboratory for testing the boundaries of postmodernist literary development and the reader’s altered position in encountering hypertext fiction. In the beginning, one of the most popular forms of developing hypertext was through the StorySpace software. Later, I’ll be examining a text produced using this software. However since the rapid popularity of the internet in the ’90 s, hypertext’s compatible cyber development has optimised ways to decentralise the author and provide the reader greater agency. The worldwide web itself serves as an example of a wide-ranging hypertext where the reader can contribute to the text, shift from different ‘lexias’ which would, in this case, be the different searches and choose the order of the ‘lexias’, as well as be exposed to a range of different media. The story space software although limited in the range of interactive media offered, allows readers the autonomy to decide which pathway to follow, the extent to follow it and even save their selected pathway, add textual inputs and save the manner of reading from a particular pathway, thus creating a simultaneous text to refer to. However, with the development of cybertext run software, the scope has been extended to include various hypermedia media where narrative possibilities include text in all its forms from digital pictures, symphony music, pop art, movie clippings, audio recordings, etc. Perhaps one of the most involved examples of interactive digital reading has been through the use of ‘physio-hypertext’ where the rate of the reader’s breathing exists symbiotically with the text as it determines the pace of its reading. The substitution of more authoritarian forms of hypertext that gave the reader the illusion of complete power over the text, although what at most was being granted was a choice between select pathways pre-decided by the hypertext creator/designer, by more dialogical, interactive hypertext fiction that allows for the reader to draw networks and cross-linkages beyond the ambit of provided choices, inserting their own thoughts, comments, and forming meaningful forms of linkages with other texts or sources. The fracturing and fragmenting of an all-encompassing narrative invite one to examine the nature of narrative, and to question this is to invite reflection on the very nature of culture and, possibly, even on the nature of humanity itself. ‘Far from being one code among many that a culture may utilize for enduring experience with meaning, narrative is a meta code, a human universal on the basis of which transcultural messages about the nature of a shared reality can be transmitted’ (White 1987). The hypertext form thus embodies physically the very quality innate to post-modernity—‘an incredulity towards meta-narratives’ (Lyotard 1984). The interactive nature of hypertext narrative is not unprecedented. Joyce’s Ulysses and Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristam Shandy are examples of postmodern narratives that call attention to their own constructed-ness, as well as to the process of reading itself. Other genres of pre-hypertext, print interactive

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fiction include ‘choose-your-own-adventure-story’ or the classic who-dun-it detective novels. Although both forms tend to encourage reader involvement, one of the prime distinctions between the two, then is grounded in the agency accorded to the reader in really reconfiguring a pre-constituted text. In the case of interactive fiction, the reader has more autonomy than allowed by linear narratives but remains in essence a reader. However, these fragments have a teleological trajectory and numerous but definitive endings. What the reader is offered then, is a choice of narratives and that too these pathways are not offered simultaneously. In the process of choosing the narrative, the more traditional element of narratology, especially the plot gets preeminence. In the case of hypertext fiction, the fragments or ‘lexia’ are extensively networked and cross-networked in all directions providing a self-reflexive circuit that the more planar models of interactive print fiction cannot. Various metaphors can be employed to represent hypertext fiction. Represented, rather as moving through space than time, the rhetoric of nettings can have undertones of ‘the rhetoric of colonial narrative-of expansion, exploration and co optician’ (Gilbert 1997). However, as this paper examines the enduring consequences of encountering hypertext fiction, it is based not on individual hypertexts but the reader/writer of these hypertexts. The metaphor that emerges in this case to describe such a reader is that of the cyborg. Haraway’s conception of the cyborg that represents a denaturalisation of the organic body to include non-human elements, accompanies a challenge to selfconstituting systems and a reworking of the body politic itself. The metaphor of the cyborg body is a particularly apposite one in a postmodern world of high technological culture, where the radical ambiguity between the human and the non-human is a challenge to the dualisms of the Western episteme, particularly that of nature and culture. In the absence of an origin story, the cyborg is completely non-innocent and defies the Western epistemological narrative of as Haraway pithily notes, ‘a once-upon-a time wholeness before language, before writing, before Man’ (Haraway 1991). The radical potential of this postmodern fragmentation that provides resistance to a transcendental authority also finds resonance in the figure of the reader/writer encountering digital hypertext fiction. It can well be observed that the hypertext form allows for the re-embodiment of postmodern fragmentation. The bodily corporeality of the reader in the text allows for a blurring of borders between man and technology, innate to the model of the cyborg paradigm. Exploring the politics of hypertext, Diane Greco observes that, hypertext shares not only the cyborg insistence on patchwork subjectivity, a narrative ‘art of making do,’ but also the cyborg resistance to final determination or characterization, a resistance with consequences that are not only intellectual and theoretical, but also political - as a technology with consequences for material bodies as they ground actual lives (2013).

The critical function of the cyborg in its denaturalisation of the body and its interrogation of a given homeostatic system of creation closely resembles that of hypertext’s incredulity towards epistemological meta-narratives. The last section of this paper examines how the social implications of this cyborg challenge to a normative body are exemplified in Shelley Jackson’s hypertext novel, A Patchwork Girl

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where the postmodern appropriation of the Frankenstein myth is a turn away from the monstrous to the post-human body. In her hypertext novel Patchwork Girl (1995) Jackson resurrects the aborted female ‘monster’ in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to interrogate the monstrous sign from a postmodern feminist position. The digital landscape of the hypertext system is particularly apt for this purpose. As in the case of Frankenstein’s ‘monster’, the ‘female monster’ is an outcome of the technology itself. Since the position of the body in narrative provides meaning to the body, the endless narrative possibilities of hypertext prevent a cohesive representation of the body. This is best exemplified in the metaphor made literal of the ‘patchwork body’. The hypertext medium is analogous to the monstrous body, in its function of re-evaluating established narratives, be it of literature or society. Similar to Mary Shelley’s use of the term ‘monster’ which the narrative subsequently renders ambiguous, Jackson too refers to the patchwork hypertext creation as a monster but systematically subverts the claim. The self-acclaimed monster after a unit titled ‘hideous progeny’ follows it up with the pithy speculation of ‘Why Hideous’: They tell me each of my parts is beautiful and I know that all are strong. Every part of me is human and proportional to the whole. Yet I am a monster because I am multiple, and because I am mixed (Jackson 1995).

This is particularly significant because of two different reasons. Firstly the monstrous sign is not grounded in the body, but instead in the patchwork assemblage. Secondly, the argument for monstrosity pivoted on multiple subjectivities, becomes redundant in postmodern society, as the idea of a unified self is rapidly dismantled. This however does not imply a denial of the corporeality of the body. The body of this female ‘monster’ is held together by patchwork, each part contributing not to overall disembodiment, but the possibility of multiple subjectivities. Different from Victor Frankenstein’s creation resurrected from parts of decaying flesh, she is made of living parts, each retaining the distinct personality of their previous owner. The ‘monster’ in the lexia titled ‘left leg’ describes it as ‘always twitching, jumping, jogging. It wants to go places, it has had enough of waiting’. This restlessness is attributed to the personality of its source: ‘[A] nanny who harboured under her durable grey dresses and sensible undergarments a remembrance of a less sensible time: a tattoo of a ship and the legend Come Back To Me’ (Jackson 1995). In a microcosm of the hypertext form itself, ‘each part has a story, and each part constructs a different subjectivity’ (Hayles 2005). Jackson, in an accompanying essay to the novel further engages with the question of embodiment in hypertext. Hierarchies break down into chains of likenesses; The self may have no clear boundaries, but do we want to lose track of it altogether? I don’t want to lose the self, only to strip it of its claim to naturalness, its compulsion to protect its boundaries, its obsession with wholeness and its fear of infection. I would like to invent a new kind of self which doesn’t fetishize so much, grounding itself in the dearly-loved signs and stuff of personhood, but has poise and a sense of humor, changes directions easily, sheds parts and assimilates new ones. Desire rather than identity is its compositional principle (Shelley 1997).

Monstrosity itself is contingent on the beholder/viewer. In the case of hypertext, however, the reader/beholder occupies a very slippery position. In the hyper-real

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world of shifting subjectivities, the distinction between the externality/internality supposition between the reader and writer dissolves. As Landow has astutely observed, ‘the reader of hypertext is truly an active reader’ (Landow 1992). She/he in the case of Jackson’s text, not only interprets the various meanings of the body but in fact, constructs them. The female ‘monster’ cajoles the reader into giving meaning to the body. For example ‘I am buried here, you can resurrect me but only piecemeal, if you want to see the whole you will have to sew me together with yourself’ (Jackson 1995). Thus the hypertext reader himself/herself becomes a cyborg reader, ‘not only because of his/her prosthetic relation with the creature but the text forces us to adopt a gaze which is equally modular and fragmentary’ (Sanchez and Almagro 2006). The hollowing out of the monstrous sign, the shift away from representations of its bodily monstrosities to the post-human, postmodern body is concomitant with the realisation of multiple subjectivities, and the increasing awareness of the impossibility of a unified human subject. Though the monstrous body becomes redundant in postmodern culture, the cyborg or the post-human body retains in its stead the climacteric function of constantly disrupting conceptual systems steeped in ideas of center, hierarchy, uniformity, and reinvigorates them with ones of plurality, extended networks and non-normative differences.

References Bordo, Susan. 2003. Unbearable weight: feminism, western culture, and the body. Berkley: University of California Press. Foucault, M. 1991. Discipline and punish: the birth of the prison. Trans. Alan Sheridian. London: Penguin Publishers. Foucault, M. 2003. Abnormal: lectures in college de France 1974–75. Trans. Graham Burchell. New York: Picador. Greco, D. n.d. Hypertext has always been political and about bodies. http://www.cyberartsweb.org/ cpace/ht/greco3.html. Accessed May 1, 2013. Gilbert, P. 1997. Meditations upon hypertext: a rhetorethics for cyborgs. JAC: A Journal of Composition Theory 17 (1): 23–38. Gandhi, L. 2006. Affective communities: anticolonial thought and the politics of friendship. Delhi: Permanent Black. Haraway, D. 1991. Simians, cyborgs, and women: the reinvention of nature. Plymbridge Distributors Ltd. Hayles, K. 2005. My Mother was a computer: digital subjects and literary texts. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Jackson, Shelley. 1995. Patchwork Girl. Watertown: Eastgate Systems (Hypertext). Jackson, Shelley. 1997. Stitch Bitch: The Patchwork Girl MIT Communications Forum. http://web. mit.edu/comm-forum/papers/jackson.html. Accessed February 20, 2020. Joselit, David. 2000. The Video Public Sphere. Art JournalVol. 59 (2): 46–53. Joshi, M. (ed.). 2010. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein or. The Modern Prometheus, World View Critical Editions. Worldview Publications. Landow, G. 1992. Hypertext: the convergence of contemporary critical theory and technology. London: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

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Lyotard, J. 1984. The postmodern condition: a report on knowledge. Trans. Fredric Jameson. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. Lyotard, J. 1991. The inhuman: reflections on time. California: Stanford University Press. Nelson, Ted. 1981. Literary Machines. California: Mindful Press. O’Day, M. 2001. Postmodernism and television. In Routledge companion to postmodernism. London: Routledge. Punday, D. 2003. Narrative bodies towards a corporeal narratology. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Sanchez, Carolina and Manuel Almagro. 2006. Gathering the limbs of the text in Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl. Atlantis 28 (1): 115–129. White, H. 1987. Narrative discourse and historical representations. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press.

Chapter 14

‘Moving’ Poetry: Affect and Aesthetic in Instapoetry Shweta Khilnani

Abstract Instapoetry refers to a new form of poetry that is usually found on social media platforms including Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. In the past decade, Instapoetry has emerged as an immensely popular phenomenon especially among young digital natives. The digital medium acts as its primary mode of circulation and this has a fundamental bearing on Instapoetry’s literary and visual aesthetic. At the same time, it is characterized by strong emotional ethos as it invites readers to participate affectively with poetry. This chapter will discuss Instapoetry as a form of digital or electronic literature in conjunction with the flow of affect or emotions in digital spaces. Essentially, it establishes a dialectic relationship between theories of digital or new media narratives and the production and flow of affect. I argue that the ‘always already incomplete’ nature of digital texts facilitates movement of affect in cyberspace. This, in turn, leads to new forms of political engagement which is premised on banality, sensations and affect. Keywords Instapoetry · Rupi kaur · Affect · Digital literature · Emotions In 2017, a report by the National Endowment of the Arts revealed that the number of poetry readers grew by 76% from 2012. The most substantial increase was among the young adult population, more specifically women and people of color (NEA 2018). In the same year, Rupi Kaur’s book titled milk and honey was the top-selling collection of poetry which sold 3.5 million copies and was translated into 40 languages. Kaur is one among a coterie of young poets known as Instapoets who share their poems on social media platforms like Instagram. Owing to their immense popularity, especially among young adult digital natives, popular publications have hailed it as the revival of poetry in the contemporary age even as literary critics have been much less welcoming of this phenomenon. Through this chapter, I wish to call attention to the emotional and affective dimension of such poetry and how it creates feelings of relatability among readers. This chapter will study the relationship between Instapoetry as digital or electronic literature and the ways in which affect travels in digital space. Besides S. Khilnani (B) Department of English, SGTB Khalsa College, University of Delhi, Delhi, India e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 S. Malhotra et al. (eds.), Inhabiting Cyberspace in India, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-9934-7_14

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defining its literary and visual aesthetic, the mode of production and circulation of Instapoetry also facilitates affective engagement and participation. As this form of poetry moves through cyberspace, it simultaneously ‘moves’ its readers emotionally, paving the way for new forms of political involvement. Instapoetry is the name given to a new form of poetry that is consciously designed for circulation on social media platforms including Instagram, Twitter and Tumblr. Such poetry is characterized by a distinct aesthetic which is a marked departure from traditional literary poetic conventions. To begin with, the poems usually comprise of short single stanzas containing four to six sentences with frequent line breaks, they are written in free verse and they often contain a complementary visual component. Thematically, they deal with a variety of issues that might be social or political in nature; however, the engagement with these themes is exceedingly personal and emotional. The language used and the mode of expression is clearly designed to invoke immediate feelings among readers. In other words, these poems have a strong affective dimension which is bolstered by their aesthetic of minimalism and simplicity. Significantly, the form and content of Instapoetry is informed fundamentally by its mode of production and circulation. To borrow Katherine N. Hayles’ term, these poems are “digital born” i.e. they are created keeping in mind the mode of circulation facilitated by social media platforms (Hayles 2007). In order to successfully adapt to the electronic or digital medium, such poems are designed to be easily accessible and effortlessly readable by a large number of people. The sonnet or haiku-like structure of the poem, the frequent line breaks, and the combination of literary and visual material attract the attention of the audience at the level of form. At the same time, the thematic focus of these poems is mediated through an appeal to a shared emotional sensibility, further amplifying their potential for instant consumption and appreciation. Incidentally, a majority of the Instapoets are young women who write about a wide variety of themes including distinctly female issues like menstrual taboos, female sexuality, physical trauma, etc. Many of these poets hail from minority or immigrant backgrounds and started off by producing poetry on social media platforms before going on to publish collections of such poetry. Rupi Kaur, the most recognizable of such names, is an Indian born Canadian poet who boasts of 4 million followers on Instagram. Like several other Instapoets, Kaur began sharing her poems on Instagram and published her first collection titled milk and honey in 2014. Since then, Kaur’s multiple volumes of poetry have spent 41 consecutive weeks on the New York Times bestseller’s list and she was the bestselling poet in 2017. In fact, out of the 20 bestselling poets in 2017, 12 labelled themselves as Instapoets (Alkhalby 2019). Kaur’s poetry revolves around themes of pain and trauma, womanhood, diasporic subjectivity, etc. For instance, one of her very short poems reads like this—“our backs/tell stories/no books have/the spine to/carry” (Kaur 2020). This text is accompanied by a stick figure like visual of a woman’s frail back and the feeling of pain is evoked through highlighting the contours of her flesh. A sizable portion of Kaur’s poetry deals with feminine experiences and tries to forge a collective of sisterhood as is evident in this next poem—“I stand/on the sacrifices/of a million women before me/thinking/what can I do/to make this mountain taller/so the women after me/can

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see farther” (Kaur 2019). Besides these themes, her poetry is centered on distinctly affect induced issues like love, loneliness, and self-worth among others. They are usually inspirational or therapeutic in nature, urging readers to find value within themselves. There are several other Instapoets including Harnidh Kaur, Nikita Gill, Karuna Ezara Parikh, etc. who appropriate a similar literary and visual aesthetic in their creations. Harnidh Kaur is a Delhi based poet who defines herself as a “raging feminist” in her Twitter bio-note. Her poetry is usually longer than its typical counterparts on Instagram and she regularly experiments with poetic verse and meter. While some of her poems employ unconventional line breaks and meter, others have an almost prose-like quality to them. In the following excerpt from an untitled poem, Harnidh Kaur indulges in self-expression as she writes “every breath strips me down till/I am hunched over my own emptiness, /you ask why I’m crying and I have no answer” (Kaur 2019). At the same time, there are poets who use social media platforms to articulate politically sensitive opinions. This is particularly relevant in the case of Ather Zia, who hails from Kashmir and uses poetry to highlight the different forms of violence and strife that mar life in their homeland. Quite predictably, Instapoetry has been extremely ill-received by literary critics who have denounced it as a base and commercialized form of poetry which is turning a noble art form into a mechanized industry. In a deeply critical essay, Rebecca Watts, an acclaimed poet, declared that such “artless poetry” is characterized by a “denigration of intellectual engagement and rejection of craft” (Watts 2018). The lack of literary craft and nuance in such poetry has often come under attack and it has been deemed as “cliched, banal, derivative, portentous, repetitive and manipulative” (Hodgkinson 2019). At the same time, critics have cautioned against the blurring of individual and collective trauma which can lead to the commodification of painful experiences (Giovanni 2017). Even as this form of cultural production might not live up to arbitrarily defined literary and poetic standards, or it might be accused of exploiting sensitive issues for commercial success, its potential lies in its unique medium of circulation and its affective dimension, the appeal it has for readers, and its potential to forge a collective out of individual identities. I wish to use this collection of poetry as a lens to map the production and circulation of affect in digital spaces. How does this poetry become synonymous with notions of honesty, emotions and sensations? How is this a departure from more traditional conceptions of literary poetry? How does affect travel and gain resonance in digital spaces? And finally, what is the political valence of such an emotional, affective form of poetry? In order to answer the above-mentioned questions, it is imperative to study Instapoetry under the rubric of electronic literature. By looking at these forms of production within the purview of new media technologies, I wish to study how they travel and accrue meaning. While digital texts have been associated with qualities like hypertextuality and hypermediality, I will limit my study to the constant recirculation and remixing of meaning of these texts owing to the sharing economy of the internet. In an attempt to define electronic literature, N. Katherine Hayles writes that it is

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generally considered to exclude print literature that has been digitized. Instead, electronic literature is digitally born, created and usually meant to be read on a computer (Hayles 2007). The Electronic Literature Organization defines electronic literature or ‘e-lit’ as “works with important literary aspects that take advantage of the capabilities and contexts provided by the standalone or networked computer” (2007). Both these definitions prioritize the role played by the technology of computer networks which acts as the medium of production and circulation of digital texts. In the case of Instapoetry, the materiality of social media platforms has a fundamental bearing on its literary, aesthetic and affective dimensions. Social media platforms are inherently dynamic and fluid in nature and are characterized by movement. Content is constantly being created, shared, circulated, liked and commented on. This perennial flow means that the impact or meaning of a text is constantly evolving as newer layers of significance are accrued over time. Serge Bouchardon attests to this quality of digital texts when he argues that “with the digital, it is not only the medium but the content itself which becomes manipulable. Manipulability is the very principle of the digital” (2018). Owing to this, Hayles goes on to call it a “hopeful monster” wherein “different vocabularies, expertises and expectations come together” (2007). It is fairly common for digital texts, more specifically Instapoetry, to be shared by followers with a personalized comment or an image. As this cycle of sharing continues, the meaning and message of the poem evolve over time within the networked materiality of social media platforms. In the book titled New Directions in Digital Poetry, C. T. Funkhouser writes that digital poetry exists in a “state of being molded, receiving shape, made to assume many forms” (2012). Significantly, the form or medium of Instapoetry invites different ways of participation from the audience. These can vary from gestural involvement like clicking or hovering over hyperlinks or commenting on or sharing existing texts. As a result, digital texts always exist as fragments as newer dynamics are added and existing ones are reshaped continuously. While certain forms of reader involvement are well documented in studies of digital literature; with respect to Instapoetry, it is affective involvement which has an overbearing influence on its multiple implications. Even if the reader does not participate in the material circulation of Instapoetry within a networked platform, there is a degree of emotional involvement evoked by the literary and poetic aesthetic. The distinctively emotional appeal of these poems, coupled with their simplicity and minimalism, has been identified as the primary cause behind their roaring popularity and success. Claire Albrecht argues that this form of poetry is distinguished by the trust and emotional connectedness with the author/poet (2018). They are received by their followers as extensions of their own emotions, or things they might have been feeling but haven’t been able to express themselves. Therefore, the essence or interpretation of these poems is constantly being defined and altered by the range of emotions lent to them by their readers. Just like other forms of electronic or digital literature, Instapoems are not singular, standalone objects; instead, they become constantly changing assemblages due to the parallel circulation of affect or emotions which lend them new layers of meaning. At this point, it must be clarified that the relationship between poetry and feeling or sensation is well documented in literary criticism. The role played by emotions in the

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creation and reception of poetry is particularly important in Romantic poetry. In the preface to the Lyrical Ballads, William Wordsworth famously declared that “poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotions recollected in tranquility” (1979). One of the core philosophical concepts underlying Romantic poetry is the notion of the sublime, which is by definition something incomprehensible and inexplicable, a fundamentally hidden phenomenon that can only be recognized by its effects on the addressee (Lyotard 1991). As a result, it bypasses understanding and goes straight to the senses (Littau 2006). Therefore, sensation and emotions played a significant role in the creation and analysis of Romantic poetry. With the affective turn, a phrase used to describe a renewed interest in how affect and emotion help us understand the self and the society, questions about the role played by emotions in the understanding of poetry have gained more traction in literary criticism. In a study of contemporary innovative poetry, Jon Clay contends that this form of poetry is fundamentally non-representational and prioritizes sensation over signification (2010). In simpler terms, “the poetry does not mean something, it does something” (Clay 2010), it acts directly on its readers even when it doesn’t strictly signify anything in concrete terms. In the case of digital poetry, the networked technology of new media platforms enhances this affective dimension of poetry. In order to appreciate this phenomenon, it is imperative to briefly understand dominant theories about the circulation of affect. First, even as the terms feeling, emotion and affect have been used interchangeably till now in this chapter, some affect theorists have tried to differentiate between them. Brian Massumi, a leading theorist of affect studies, defines an emotion or a feeling as a “recognized affect, an identified intensity” (2002) possessed or owned by a subject. Under this rubric, emotions are inherently cognitive in nature based on a process through which we react to external stimuli. On the contrary, affect is “primordially an unrecognized recognition” (Reyes 2012), it is intensive, involuntary, and always comes before cognitive thought. Massumi refers to this as ‘visceral perception’ or the way in which our internal organs perceive external sensations prior to their apprehension at a cognitive level (2002). In a similar vein, Patricia Clough defines affect as a “vector of unqualified intensity seeking future actualization; it is a vehicle from one dimension of time to another” (2012). It has the potential to pre-empt the future and bridge the gap between lived and not yet lived experience. Athina Karatzogianni argues that this distinction between emotion and affect is significant with respect to digital environment. Theorists of cyberspace agree that it is characterized by its rapid pace and fluid stability and is imagined as a realm where “no reference, authority, dogma or certitude will remain unchallenged” (Levy 2005). Owing to this fundamental quality of fluidity and ambiguity, Karatzogianni argues that our interaction with contemporary digital media operates “beyond the representational, beyond the semantic and semiotic level” (2012). As a result, it is not an emotion but affect that is our socio-technical subjectivity’s response to the digital environment (Karatzogianni 2012). Since affect is by definition autonomous of the body and escapes confinement, Karatzogianni contends that the digital virtual offers a zone of affect or a system of affective structures that actualize or materialize revolutionary instincts (2012).

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Taking into account existing theoretical interpretations of the functioning of affect, it can be surmised that affect is immeasurable by traditional means. It is an amorphous intensity that is intensely visceral and pre-cognitive and is fundamentally dynamic and alive in nature. Since it is constantly in a state of motion, it allows people to occupy the space of non-lived or not yet lived experientiality. When an individual encounters a text which stirs an affective response, he or she partakes in the text without being involved with it materially or without having experienced it personally. Therefore, affect pre-empts the actual experience and allows the reader to establish strong bonds of relativity to the text. In the case of digital poetry, literary and aesthetic qualities promote the production of such affective responses. While conducting a study among fans and followers of Instapoets, Albrecht discovered that respondents repeatedly emphasized that Instapoetry is extremely accessible and it functions as an extension of their own voice (2012). More specifically, the poems manage to capture succinctly the emotions and feelings that they have been experiencing but haven’t been able to put into words. This precisely is the affective appeal of this form of poetry. It makes people believe that they share the same experience or feelings as the poem explicates. It occupies a zone of intensity or affect which lies beyond the realm of signification or representation, i.e. Instapoetry ‘moves’ its audience to relatability. It doesn’t matter what the poem means, it is more important to focus on what it does and how the form and aesthetic contribute to this production of affect. Testifying to the dynamic nature of affect, Sara Ahmed argues that it does not positively reside in a subject or figure but instead it works as a form of capital, i.e. affect is produced only as an effect of its circulation (2004). Thus, emotions are not thought of as feelings originating in or possessed by individuals, instead, they derive their power through movement between different signs and people. Besides informing the dominant visual and literary aesthetic of digital poetry, networked media also fundamentally shapes the meaning acquired by digital or electronic texts (as has been discussed in detail earlier). The constant circulation of such texts makes them inherently alive in nature and they are constantly being molded and shaped by the materiality of the networks where they circulate. This quality of being ‘always incomplete’ or never having attained a finality of meaning is fundamental to the functioning of both affect and digital texts. They lack a fixity of implication and derive their valence from being in a state of constant circulation. This ‘always already incomplete’ nature of digital texts complements the imagined affective participation generated by Instapoetry. Coupled with their aesthetic, this contributes to their manipulability, as a result of which, such poems trigger an intense response, creating an almost visceral form of involvement. As readers participate via this production of affect, poems acquire new layers of implication. In this way, affect and meaning get closely aligned in digital texts since both are constantly being produced in the process of circulation. The prevalence of emotions and feelings in the digital realm also signals towards a new form of political expression. Increasingly, scholars have demystified traditional assumptions that dictate that emotions are apolitical since they occupy the personal domain. Lauren Berlant argues that the contemporary public sphere is intimate and

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sentimental in nature. Berlant introduces the concept of an ‘intimate public’, a textually mediated category that carries a vernacular sense of belonging to a community through the foregrounding of affective and emotional attachments. She goes on to say that such collectives can harness the power of emotion to develop new social relations and create a counter-conventional space by playing with generic classifications (Berlant 2008). Similarly, Kathleen Stewart writes about the role played by ‘public feelings’ and ‘ordinary affects’ in our interaction with the outside world (2007). Digital space is a particularly fertile area to explore the dialectic between affect and politics in this day and age. Critics like Karatzogianni have convincingly argued that the modality of affect circulation in digital spaces ensures that it is “less and less necessary to experience actuality first before its potential is materialized” (2012). In other words, the networked technologies of digital platforms provide new modes of engagement and experience, paving the way for novel regime of politics which is banal, emotional, and affective in nature. This brand of politics isn’t encumbered by its virtual medium or its non-rational emotionality. Quite the contrary, these factors combine to produce a space full of possibilities or in Karatzogianni’s terms, a digital virtual “more real than the reality it simulates” (2012).

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